End of the world

I've been re-reading some books I have on possible ways that the world could end. If most poeple uttered that sentence, you'd have a fair shot at accuracy if you made some comment about UFO's, Nostradamus, or seven-headed dragons from the East. None of those things pop up in the types of books about which I'm talking, and which I've been devouring with some felicity over the past few days.

Some of these books deal only with scenarios of human extinction. Notably, a book ("The End of the World: The science and ethics of human extinction") by John Leslie has occupied me for the day. It deals quite ostensibly with issues like the eruption of super-volcanos, global warming, ecological disruption, biological warfare, nuclear war, and super-diseases. Scattered among his random scenarios (which include significant scientific explanation and analysis as to possibility and plausibility), he has some quite interesting (though less plausible) ways for humankind to end our brief experiment in living.

1) Star-Wars. Back in the 1980's, President Reagan pushed for a missile-defense system based around a series of satellites armed with lasers. The idea was that if someone (the Soviets) launched a nuclear missle at us, we could use the laser to shoot it and make it explode in the high atmosphere, instead of down on the ground over us. In theory, the idea sounds good. While having radioactive debris scattered through the high atmosphere isn't great, it's arguably a better option than a 10-miles wide smoking crater where Chicago used to be. Recently, President G.W. Bush brought back the idea of a missile-defense system. The goal is the same - to make the nuke explode at the highest point of its arc - only this time we would have specialized missles we would fire to intercept the nuke instead of lasers. Why is this a problem?

Well, many scientists who objected to to original Star Wars (the nickname of Reagan's program) idea on non-logistical grounds did so because of a particular fear. Apparently, we've never exploded a nuclear weapon in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Due to the gases which make up our atmosphere at the levels where we would be blowing up a nuclear weapon, the possibility of fire is a worry. The keen reader might wonder what material would catch on fire if we detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, and the answer is simply this: the atmosphere. Yes, many scientists worried that the intense energy burst of a nuclear weapon could IGNITE THE ATMOSPHERE, causing all of the gases which keep us (and all other living things around here) alive to be burned off the planet in a matter of a few minutes.

If you can imagine a wall of flames extending from the ground to the top of our atmosphere, and from horizon to horizon, rushing toward you at nearly the speed of sound and not get chills, you are a stronger man than I.

2) Another book ("Our Final Hour" by Sir Martin Rees), details an interesting possibility that encompasses far more than the end of human life. In one particularly stunning example of the dangers of theoretical physics, he outlines a possibility which left even me a little shocked and worried. Theoretical physicists are building larger and more powerful particle accelerators each year, and larger experiments are being conducted than have ever been done before in the field.

For those of you who don't know what a particle accelerator is or how it works, scientists use powerful magnets to accelerate a tiny particle around ring until it reaches almost the speed of light. Once they get it to full speed, they smash the particle head-on into another particle. This usually causes one or both particles to shatter into even tinier parts and releases an enormous amount of energy.

In what appears to be a non-sequitur but isn't really, I'll take a short break from talking about particle accelerators to discuss the energetic states of natural laws of the universe. There are many physical laws of the universe which define how all objects interact with each other. These laws are things like gravitation, the laws which determine the speed of light, and laws of thermodynamics. Well, these laws are necessary for the universe to exist in the manner in which we know it, but there is absolutely no reason why these laws are necessary. We could easily imagine an alternate universe where a different set of natural laws governed existence.

The problem with our natural laws and constants is that we do not know where they lie on a graphical representation of the energetic states of all possible sets of natural laws and constants. At least in our universe as it exists now, we would expect for our constants and laws to be settled into their lowest energetic states. We can safely say without much hesitation that there are no small changes that could be made to the laws of our universe without having them slide back to their former values quickly.
Think of a ball sitting in a small hollow. With the expenditure of a small amount of energy, you could lift the ball a small bit from it's hollow. If you released the ball, it would roll back down into the hollow where it previously sat. But what would be the result if the ball were in a small hollow halfway up a hill? A small expenditure of energy would still cause it to be displaced only a small bit and it would return to its previous location, but if you expended enough energy to raise it up entirely out of its hollow, it would proceed to roll down the hill until it reached the bottom of the hill (or another hollow).
In mathematical terms, our universe rests in a 'minimum' of energetic states (the vertical axis on which the graph is drawn), but we don't have any idea whether it rests at a local minimum (the hollow on a hill) or the absolute minimum (the bottom of the hill).

Here's where particle accelerators come into play. When we smash the particles into each other, they release huge amounts of energy all at once in a very small area. There is the risk that such an expenditure of energy will move the ball (the laws of our universe) out of the minimum in which we sit. If we in fact are only in a local minimum of possibilities, we would proceed to 'roll' down the line of possibilities until we reached a new stable location (a new minimum).

To say that such an event would unmake mankind is likely an understatement. In all likelihood, we might be unmaking mankind, the Earth, our solar system, our galaxy, our universe, and even the empty space in which it is situated. The idea of settling into a group of laws which make the existence of matter itself impossible is not out of the picture.

What is a bit scarier is that what we view as empty space has occasional particles speeding through it at near the speed of light. They are routinely shot out of stars as a result of the nuclear processes which keep the stars burning. There exists a small chance that someday two of these particles could strike each other head-on in the depths of space on the other side of the universe and achieve the same result. Our entire universe and everything contained in it might simply cease to exist in a single instant because of a chance meeting of two particles so far away that the light from the suns which emitted them never reached the Earth.

Yikes.

How to tell that I'm a nerd

My idea of a fabulous Friday night is getting together with a friend for an 11-hour networked gaming session that ended at 5:00 am this morning, while talking about Dungeons & Dragons and science, and eating a pizza. Awesome.

My apartment is nice, but the management is awful

I've been in a bit of a bind, this last week due to a shortage of dishes. For any of you who have seen my kitchen cabinets, that statement should come as a bit of a shock. I have dinner plate service for about 20, salad plate service for another 15 or so, a decent number of bowls, and perhaps 30-some odd cups and glasses. Add to that a wide variety of pots and pans, baking dishes and the like and you have a decently stocked kitchen when it comes to dishware.

I didn't do my dishes on Friday night or on Saturday night (I was too lazy to load the dishwasher). On Sunday night, when I had 3 days worth of dishes, I loaded up the dishwasher and set it to run. Not 10 minutes into its cycle, I got a phone call from the maintenance person for my apartment complex.

He asked me if I was running any water in my apartment. When I told him that the only water running was from my dishwasher, he asked me to turn it off and said that water was leaking into the downstairs apartment. I quickly did as he instructed, and he told me he'd be upstairs (he was down in their apartment at the time) to see about the leak.

When he came upstairs, he said he couldn't see the leak, but that it was probably behind the dishwasher somewhere, and that he'd be by on Monday sometime to fix it. He asked me what times I would be at home on Monday, and I told him that I'd be in all day, apart from an early morning class. He said he'd probably be by sometime around lunch or after to fix the dishwasher. He told me that in the meantime, I should avoid running any water in my kitchen.

I was in all day Monday, and skipped several errands I wanted to run. Nobody showed up to fix my dishwasher. Add to my pile of dishes Monday's dishes.

And Tuesday's dishes. And Wednesday's dishes.

On Wednesday, when I walked down to the office to drop off my rent check, I asked the manager on duty about whether I could get an update on the status of fixing my dishwasher (since I was rapidly running out of dishes). She knew about the problem, and told me that they were working on fixing it, and that she'd have someone get back with me. I walked out of the office contented.

Nobody called me on Wednesday night. Or Thursday either.

On Thursday at lunch, I ran out of dishes. Not all of my dishes, certainly, since there were still some pots and pans, but I had run out of the dishes necessary to prepare any more of the food that I had on hand.

I spent the next 4 hours laboriously doing a week's worth of dishes, by hand, in my bathroom sink (freshly cleaned, by the way), which is small enough that it only allowed me to do one or two items at a time.

Today, on Friday, I called the management on the phone and inquired about the status of their attempt to update me on the repairs to my dishwasher. The manager on the phone had no idea that anyone was supposed to get back to me, and said that the maintenance people had resolved the issue on Monday. In fact, there had been no leak from my apartment at all into the lower apartment, but rather that there was a break in a pipe UNDERNEATH their floor that was welling water up into their carpeting.

Management can bite it. I'm not in a good mood right now.

So Kansasgirl might think about black pumps over breakfast. Not me.

As per the (half-hearted) request of one Kansasgirl, I have decided to explain a recent revelation I had concerning standing requirements and the nature of our adversarial legal system.

For a long time, I’ve had a nagging feeling about the nature of parts of our legal system. Usually, when I get these nagging feelings, they are some indication that there is some logical inconsistency in the principles underlying the administration of justice in America or some fundamental disagreement between my moral intuitions and the moral intuitions of a large number of other people.

Well, my Environmental Law class has been discussing standing requirements as part of our ongoing discussion of citizen-suits to enforce environmental laws. When asked about the purposes of standing requirements, I answered that the purpose of the requirements was largely one of efficiency. Courts refuse to give advisory opinions about matters because if they did give those opinions, they would have far too much work for them to get through in a given year, and unless we created a much larger legal system with more judges and lawyers, we would quickly create a large backlog of cases (even more so than now).

The professor disagreed and suggested that efficiency concerns were merely a happy by-product of the real reason for standing requirements, which was that it was necessary to ensure that the adversarial nature of our legal system remained intact. He (through another student) contended that if parties have some actual stake in the matter under discussion in a case, that they will make the best possible arguments for their sides.

This is undoubtedly a true statement of why having parties in interest be parties to the case is a good thing for the administration of justice. However, there is one small snag in this analysis that I feel brings the whole thing crashing to its metaphorical knees.

Over breakfast on Wednesday, I suddenly figured out what I’d been missing that gave me the nagging uncertainty about standing requirements. This then was the content of my Wednesday morning revelation, while I ate my banana and sipped some Raspberry tea: In American justice, the parties in interest are rarely the parties who come up with and make the arguments. In virtually every single case (with only a tiny number of exceptions) lawyers do all of that. Lawyers are not interested parties in the litigation. Our only legal interest in the matters over which we are paid to argue is our payment. We suffer no specific injuries (that would give us – the attorneys) standing in any case we argue before the court.

So why then is standing required for the adversarial process? Is it so hard to imagine a scenario like the following?

Suppose we do away with standing requirements entirely, and allow for advisory opinions. What prevents parties from simply presenting a question to the court and having the court appoint two attorneys to take opposite positions on the issue and make the best arguments that they can? The parties making the arguments (the lawyers) have exactly the same incentives to come up with the best possible arguments as they did in the system of justice where standing requirements were placed on the parties for whom the attorneys argued.

Aside from issues of efficiency and backlog, what reason do we have to support standing requirements? Perhaps I’m missing something, but I can’t think of any off of the top of my head.

Jerome, Nathan, and Anencephaly

Today, something became readily apparent to me in my Environmental Law class: There are very few people willing to take seriously the suffering of non-human animals. When we take seriously the suffering of another being, we create a legal remedy that can be sought in a court to prevent the suffering or to redress the harm it has already caused to the aggrieved being.

In a famous case regarding the constitutional reach of the standing doctrines (Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)), the court rejected the standing claims of some environmentalists who said that they were aggrieved by a project which threatened the habitats of crocodiles in the Middle East (which the United States was funding). The court dismissed the claims suggesting that, unless the plaintiffs had a plane ticket in their pocket to go see the crocodiles, their interest in the crocodiles was surely a very small one.

I listened to this analysis in stunned silence as classmates spoke up in response to a question by the professor to characterize the nature of the harm that was suffered. Finally, after what seemed like a large number of class responses, I had to point out that the harm here was not to the women who wished to go see crocodiles in their natural habitats.

The real harm is…

TO THE FREAKIN’ CROCODILES!

Non-human animals enjoy (or rather suffer from) a classification under the law as ‘objects.’ In law, all things are treated as either objects or persons. Persons are the possessors and exercisers of rights. Objects are those things over which persons exercise rights. Because non-human animals are not the bearers of rights, under the law we can do them no real harm (with the sole seeming exception of (non-human) animal cruelty laws). This idea should be deeply shocking to us, but to most people (including people who read this, I’d wager) it isn’t.

In class, I used an analogy that I find particularly apt. It isn’t the analogy that I would have liked to make, but making my preferred analogy would likely have drawn much more derision. My class-analogy was this. Suppose I beat your dog to death. Nothing precipitated my brutal attack. The dog didn’t bark at me or try to bite me. Instead, I just woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to beat something to death and your dog is the first thing I saw. (If you think this is far-fetched, last year in Canada, some teenagers hung a cat from a barn rafter by its tail, skinned it alive, disemboweled it, took turns beating it with a baseball bat, and then slit the still barely-living cat’s throat, and all while laughing and jeering on the video they made of the event). You decide to sue me over the death of your dog.

What is the harm over which we should be outraged? Was what I did wrong because of your loss of a dog? Is the harm the fact that you must now go purchase a new dog and will suffer the loss of the companionship of your old one? Surely not. It seems clear, to me at least, that the harm over which we should be properly outraged is the harm to the dog itself. Your harm at the loss of the dog is, at best, collateral to the actual serious harm inflicted.

The analogy I should have liked to present (and the one which I feel is the most apt and most powerful) is the analogy of slavery. If I own another being as property, and can exercise my rights of property (alienation, use, disposal and waste, etc.) over that other human being, what is the harm if you come and kill my slave? Is the harm truly to me – the slaveholder – or is it to the slave himself who suffered the attack?

For a long time, humankind has divided the animal world into humans and all things that are not human. The reason for this can only be described in speciesist terms. Non-human animals (from across the spectrum) have many of the same capacities as human animals. You can find examples of non-human animals that can feel pain in identical ways and with the same intensities, can fear, hope, love, hate, use languages and tools, have politics, pass culture from generation to generation, solve complex problems through the use of insight instead of trial and error, have arts, play, engage in abstract mental representations of the real world, can self-recognize, can self-medicate, can remember the past and understand the concept of the future, can tell the truth or lie as the situation dictates to them, can perform simple mathematics, and have a sense of justice and morality.

At the same time, there are human beings to which we accord substantial rights (rights to life, liberty, and autonomy) who cannot recognize themselves, who cannot use languages or tools, and in fact have few (if any) of the above characteristics. A good example of this would be the severely mentally retarded or infants. Infant humans have mental capacities far below those of a large percentage of adult non-human animals. What principled line – not based solely on membership to a particular species - can we draw that puts the human newborn on one side of the line (the side to which we accord rights) and puts ALL non-human animals on the other side of the line?

Even more telling, what about anencephalic babies? Periodically newborns emerge into this world with a disorder known as anencephaly, which literally means ‘without a head.’ In reality, these children are fully lacking in a cerebellum, and usually lack significant portions of the upper skull as well. The children possess a cerebrum and brain stem, which regulate the autonomic functions of the body (like breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and such). The child is fully alive in the standard meaning of the term, but is not, and never will be conscious. Ever. The child is permanently and utterly unable to sense, perceive, or react consciously to the world around it. Yet, an individual could be prosecuted for first degree murder if he purposefully killed one of these infants.

At the same time, we have examples like Jerome the Chimpanzee, whose life is recounted in the introduction to a book I highly recommend on the issue of legal rights for animals (Rattling the Cage by law professor Steven M. Wise). Chimpanzees, like Jerome, possess nearly all (if not all) of the faculties I listed above. They are our closest living genetic relatives.

Jerome was owned by an animal research and testing company in Georgia. From his infancy on, scientists repeatedly infected Jerome with numerous strains of the AIDS virus, and denied him treatment for any of the accompanying illnesses and infections. Jerome lived in a small concrete box in a basement room where he never was allowed to see the outside world, slept in a cell that regularly reached less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit at night, and had to exist in immense suffering as his body slowly decayed and was eaten away by illness after illness. In the end he died - after having been subjected to 3 different strains of HIV, and after enduring almost 14 years of immense suffering. He died only days shy of his birthday from a hybrid strain of HIV made from two of the three previous strains.

Is that horrifying? It should be, but if not, what about this next sentence?

Nathan, another chimpanzee at the research facility was infected with an intentional transfusion of 40 milliliters of Jerome’s blood shortly before Jerome’s death. Nathan now has begun wasting away in the same manner that Jerome did shortly before him.

If the only reason we can come up with to place ALL non-human animals on one side of the proverbial line (including Jerome and Nathan), and ALL humans on the other side of the line (including the anencephalic infant) is the humans’ membership to our species, then I ask what reason we can have to include black people or women? Why not confine rights to a gender or to a race? After all, the laws were largely written by white men, for white men. Why not draw the line where our ancestors did?

To paraphrase the ethicist Peter Singer, an individual’s membership to our species is an ‘ism’ no different from sexism or racism. It is speciesism. What matters ought not to be the question ‘Are they human?,’ but the question ‘Can they suffer?”

And the suffering of non-human animals is a large problem. To confine this discussion to Jerome and Nathan would be to miss the great bulk of non-human animal suffering. According to Professor Wise, every time your heart beats, 300 mammals and birds are killed to sate our lusts for their flesh and skins. And this does not include the deaths of fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arthropods, or annelids.

Until we can take seriously the suffering of non-human animals, we are only scarcely better than our ancestors who owned their wives and their fellow men.

Klutz

I'm pretty sure I have to be the only human on the face of the planet who can manage to give himself severe burns on the forehead and nose with a bowl of New England-style clam chowder while the bowl and its contents are resting right-side up on a countertop.

Save the whales? Maybe. Save magic? Definitely.

I am in the middle of a war. The war is not a war on terrorism. It is not a war on drugs. It is instead a war on something much, much more important in how my life plays out. I’m fighting a losing war against people who are trying to destroy the best part of the fantasy genre in literature and movies – namely, magic.

I recently had the opportunity to put forth a plug for a favorite series of mine on a friend’s blog, but that wasn’t really the sort of place to discuss the greatness of my favorite series by George R.R. Martin. (MMD, what follows is not a comparison to your favorite fantasy series, because, frankly, I haven’t seen the movies or read the books and can’t accurately evaluate them. I’m discussing the problems with the types of fantasy stories I used to read when I was younger).

There is something that sets apart stories of the ‘fantasy trash’ variety (which you can find on the shelves of any diehard 14-year old ‘DragonLance’ lover) from the truly great attempts at developing the fantasy genre. That special quality is the degree to which fantastical elements are seamlessly blended with realistic elements in the correct proportions. Take, for instance, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of books. By and large, when you read the works, it is clear that most of the world seems to be quite mundanely explainable. We need no magic wands and special potions to deal with an army of Orcs standing outside the gates of a mighty citadel. Rather, we need to have a larger group of heroes and warriors standing prepared to defend their territory from the ravaging hordes outside. We don’t need to have magical flying carpets to whisk us from one end of the world to another. When the Fellowship of the Ring was to make the trip to Mount Doom, they had to walk the length of Middle-Earth, braving dangers along the way. Even in ‘The Hobbit,’ a dragon wasn’t some mystical enchanted being, but rather was simply an intelligent (and very large) reptilian beast with a penchant for collecting treasure.

What magic there was in the story (and I’m separating magic from a complicated divinity-tale) was more reserved for truly special moments in the story. It was only in stark contrast to the completely mundane explanations for how the world functioned that magic took on a mystical, awe-inspiring quality. Magic is supposed to be powerful, frightening, and (most importantly) unusual.

Imagine a superhero story like Spiderman or Superman. Why are the heroes of these stories as great as they are? Simply put, it is because they are so incredibly different from those around them. If, in Spiderman, Peter Parker were merely one of thousands of people who could shoot webs from their hands and climb up walls, we would find it interesting, but the character of ‘Spiderman’ would have lost something special. Similarly, the latest three ‘Star Wars’ movies suffer from a flaw. The original three were masterpieces of special effects, precisely because the special effects were not going on constantly. A sword fight between Jedi is mundanely explainable. Droids on a moisture farm are understood in a prosaic fashion. The truly special effects highlighted what was supposed to be important in the movie, and did so adeptly because of their absence from the rest of the story. The three new movies are a nonstop special effects marathon, which ironically completely removed the ‘specialness’ from the special effects. When I see a melee between thousands of battle-droids and a race of fish-people, I should be wowed. If I’m thinking, “more of the same,” then something important has been lost.

The same principle applies with magic. The more magic you incorporate into a story, the less and less meaningful the magic becomes, and the more and more ordinary the exercise of it seems.

That reason is why I enjoy George R.R. Martin’s series so much. In many ways, I consider it to be vastly superior even to Tolkien’s beloved Trilogy. Martin’s world is set in a medieval sort of landscape and is fraught with power struggles for the throne of an empire when the king is laid low by treachery. There are large battles, tender love stories, families who are ripped apart, and the everpresent spectre of winter (and its accompanying famine). Magic is an unknown, and scary, outside force with which our ambiguous heroes must contend. The empire can summon tens of thousands of mounted men, but how do they deal with a single sorceress from beyond the sea who can summon an insubstantial shadow to slip into their commander’s tent at night and slide a very real dagger through his chest while he sleeps? The empire can man the large Northern wall with men and war-machines, but how do they deal with an enemy that gets back up and continues to attack even after they have died?

Tolkein introduced us to no ambiguity in his fantasy regarding good and evil. The races of men, dwarves, and elves were good. Orcs and goblins were evil. If you couldn’t tell just from how they looked (ugly things are always evil, apparently), he color-coded it to resolve any lingering doubts. Gandolf (after his death and resurrection) is dressed in white. Sauron is ensconced as a gigantic flaming eye atop a hideous blackened tower in a dismal location. There are no questions in a reader’s mind about who they should root for.

Martin takes the more mature route in his literature. There are numerous great Houses in the Empire which all desire to seize the throne, and all believe (and have legitimate arguments as to why) they are the rightful heirs to the throne. You quickly find that you change what sides you root for on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Sure, House Stark is noble and your obvious protagonist family, but their claim to the throne is tenuous at best. House Targaryen was deposed and exiled due to the brutality and violence of a long line of Targaryen kings, but the current heir to that line is a woman determined to end the bloodshed and usher in an era of blessing and peace with progressive social reform. House Lannister may be double-faced and sneaky, but the bad actions of the Queen (assassinations and the like) are understandable in that she is attempting to protect her young and vulnerable children (who are too young to take the throne) from being killed while the kingdom rages around them. The brother of the old King, who likely has the most convincing bloodline argument to the throne, is a man who is determined to take the throne because it is his by right, but who would obviously be an ineffectual king who metes out cold and iron-handed justice without compassion or pity. To explain what I mean by that statement, he elevated a commoner to nobility when the commoner smuggled food into a besieged keep where the brother was holding out against a larger force, saving his life and the lives of all his men. The brother then proceeded to order the man’s fingers removed as the proper punishment for breaking the law by smuggling.

I could go on. No character is so spotlessly clean-handed that you love them for their nobility, and no character is so darkly evil that they are too far removed from what you can relate to.

By placing his books in a complicated (and I mean complicated) morality tale, keeping you guessing about who is right, what ‘right’ means in this context, and how it might all end up, instead of over-emphasizing non-stop magical occurrences, Martin keeps magic as what it should be:

Magical.

Schadenfreude

For a long time last year I was captivated by the Natalee Holloway story from the tiny island nation of Aruba. I wasn’t interested in the case due for the reasons most people were interested – which I presume was because a young (allegedly attractive) blond girl was missing in some ‘barbaric’ foreign country. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about the disappearance of the girl on more than an academic level. With as many young people go missing all over the world each year, it’s quite difficult for me to give her case any more weight than any of the hundreds of thousands of other abductions that you can look up at any given moment.

Rather, I was interested in the story because of the absolutely awful way in which I thought the mother of the girl was acting. I understand that her daughter went missing and that it seemed likely that foul play was involved. That’s more than enough reason to engage in a bit of theatrics.

What I found shocking about her behaviour was the total extent to which it showed a lack of understanding of international relations and the basics of judicial procedure. Without knowing the evidence (because the Dutch legal system doesn’t permit the kinds of transparency we allow), she pointed the finger at three young men who were seen in her daughter’s company the night her daughter disappeared. Presumably, we in the United States hold that a person should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not because it is in our laws that way, but because it is the right balance to strike in adjudging parties alleged to be guilty. By fingering these young men, the mother of the missing girl abdicated the moral ground on which all of U.S. justice is built.

When the American FBI weren’t allowed into the country to conduct as full of an investigation as the mother would have liked, she railed against the Dutch/Aruban authorities and instigated a travel boycott to the tiny island nation. To this day, I’ve never seen such a terrible case of “American Exceptionalism.” Are we really to believe that if an Aruban went missing in the United States that our law enforcement agencies would step back and tell a foreign, sovereign jurisdiction’s law enforcement to enter our country and conduct their own investigations? Surely not. Such an act would be an affront to American justice, and one can even imagine the outcry if the Netherlands sent a demand to the United States to allow their law enforcement personnel to conduct investigations on U.S. soil. But somehow, alleged the mother, America was different. We had a right to have our officials conduct investigations in a foreign, sovereign country.

What’s more, the Aruban officials detained the three men in question, and held them for quite long periods of time while investigating the disappearance of the young girl. Again, in the United States, we presumably think that a detention without charges is wrong after some short length of time, not because it is in our laws that it is so, but because we think it is right. In the United States, after arresting the three young fellows, we would have had to charge them with a crime or let them go. Not so, in Aruba. They were held, without charges, for what in the United States would have been unconstitutional lengths of time. But when that length of time ran out in Aruba (they as well feel that after some set period of time that it becomes wrong to hold people without charges), the Aruban authorities had to let them out of prison. What did the mother of the missing girl do? She demanded that they not be released. Again, she abdicated the moral ground on which the U.S. justice system is built. When Aruba let them go despite her protestations, she initiated a propaganda campaign to smear the country even more and got several governors from the U.S. to publicly bash Dutch protectorate.

When it was revealed that the father of one of the young guys was a judge, she accused the entire government of the colony of being biased and protecting one of their own. Can you imagine how that would fly if this were the reverse case? Say some young Aruban man goes missing in the United States, and it looks like he was killed in a drug deal gone bad on the streets of Miami. The police diligently investigate, pursue numerous leads, interview hundreds of people, and collect forensic evidence. When the suspicion lands on a man who lives near where the young Aruban went missing, it is discovered that this man’s brother is a judge who lives a half a state away. Would we really find it a plausible story if the parents of the missing islander decried our system of justice, suggesting that the police who investigated and the District Attorney who charged the alleged criminal were all in cahoots with this judge to keep his brother from being convicted? And wouldn’t we likely find such a propaganda campaign to be a little on the offensive side? I think we would find it quite in bad taste.

The actions of the one grieving mother went too far. The United States may be a great nation, but we do not have any authority over other countries outside of our borders. To suggest that other countries should abandon their own codes of justice must be based on some claim about the right way to administer justice or be about the nature of justice itself, and not based on the idea that we have the right to demand concessions from foreign powers just because we want something to turn out our way.

Well, a few days ago, a new witness stepped forward in the case, saying that the missing girl was seen voluntarily using drugs on the night she disappeared. The police in Aruba are now pursuing the case as a potential accidental drug overdose case and are following new leads. It makes me very happy to know that all of the mother’s sanctimonious preaching - how her daughter was a top honor student who never, ever did anything wrong, and so it must have been those three spawns of the devil who did it to her – must be a bit deflated now. Guess what? Your daughter might be responsible for her own death.

And my joy in her pain is surely something about which I ought to feel guilty.

A'int no thang for a G with the bling

Another “Spring Break” has come and gone with little to show for it. Perhaps it stems from my habitual homebodiness (making up words is fun!), but I’ve always envied the people who go off and get to do exciting things over breaks. As an undergrad, it always seemed like people I knew took roadtrips through the American southwest, visited far off relatives, swam in the Gulf of Mexico, or flew to the Bahamas. One girl I knew even took a week and flew to Switzerland because she could. I always packed up my computer and some books, drove home to Topeka, and spent a week with my parents. If they’d have left my hall open over Spring Break, I wouldn’t have even left Lawrence.

Ruminating on this led me to a startling conclusion. It’s probably neither as startling nor as shocking to others as it is to me, but I am astoundingly boring. I am quite lacking in the dangerousness and spontaneity that women seem to go for these days. Now, I realize that I have some good characteristics. I can bake. I can cook decent meals. I am a fair hand at interior decorating and flower arrangement. I’m an attentive listener and can (at times) throw out sincerely touching and considerate statements of my feelings for the people about which I care. Many years back, a high school teacher of mine (A.P. U.S. history teacher = foxxy with a double ‘x’), even defended me against a bunch of jocks in my class, who were laughing at the fact that I couldn’t get a date to my Junior prom, saying that I was exactly the kind of guy that a lot of women were looking for.

But being a nice (if somewhat absent-minded) guy doesn’t get you all that far, really, and for the same reasons that all of the most-sought-after girls at that same high school hung out with me (but wouldn’t date me): I’m safe.

So I’ve decided that I should drop some of my steady deliberate-ness and become a little more dangerous. I’ve ruled out getting a motorcycle because I’m not a fan of high speeds and the noise could damage my eardrums. I went out and looked at a leather jacket, but decided that I didn’t like how coarse it felt and decided to stay with my suede one which is much softer. I don’t have enough money to buy a fancy sports car and I am really not a fan of their low gas mileage anyway, so that’s out too. Plus, they usually only seem to have 2 doors and I’m a bigger fan of four-door sedans.

I was running out of ideas until last night. In the evenings, I usually have music running on my computer for a few hours, and as I lay in bed trying to get to sleep, a song I’d listened to earlier in the night kept running through my head. Finally, I knew I’d have to give in and go turn on my computer so that I could listen to it again.

The song was UGK’s “Like a Pimp.” I have to admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for hardcore and nasty gangsta rap, including a number of songs I have whose titles are probably not appropriate to bring up in polite company. As I dropped the dope rhymes along with Bun B, I suddenly knew what it was that I should do.

I need to become the ghetto gangsta that I keep deep inside. And to y’all what can’t handle it, White Choklit is in the house and he might just be here to stay unless he can find another way to drop the goody-goody routine.

Step into tha flava, yo. Hardcore.