What Have We Been Drinking?

The use and abuse of alcohol causes incredible amounts of damage to individuals, families, and society itself. Everyone knows that, but few people really consider all the details. Let’s think about those.

Drinkers often suffer a loss of work productivity, either from drinking or from hangovers the next day. They may develop or exacerbate weight issues by consuming the empty calories in alcoholic drinks. Excessive drinking can cause medical problems through damaging the liver or other organs. The loss of judgment that comes from drinking can lead to any number of bad results from poor decisions – from bar fights to dangerous stunts to unwanted pregnancies.

Families, of course, suffer from all the problems of the individuals. In addition, they can be damaged by the drinker turning violent, spending too much money on drinking, and patterning poor behavior in front of impressionable children. Perhaps the most drastic damage comes from drunk drivers, who can devastate or destroy an entire family with one alcohol-induced accident.

Society has to deal with all those problems writ large. The medical issues increase medical and insurance costs – likewise the drunk driver accidents. Hangovers have a noticeable effect on our Gross National Product every Monday morning. Police have to deal with the aftermath of the bar fights, the stunts, the accidents. Even the raw materials for alcoholic beverages divert agricultural resources away from more nutritional products, thus raising food prices for us all.

And yet, very few people would suggest making this disastrously dangerous drug illegal. Why? Well, we tried it once. It didn’t work. It led to a massive increase in the size, wealth, and power of organized crime. It increased the levels of violence in the streets as those criminal mobs fought the police and each other. It led to horrible corruption in the police and government officials, who found it easier and more profitable to cooperate with criminals than to combat them. Most of all, it turned a large percentage of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals as they turned to illegal sources to get the alcohol they wanted. That had to lead to a lessened respect for the law in general – a small but significant step away from the rule of law, and into anarchy. All that…and we still had all the negative effects from alcohol consumption, since the law did little to actually stop people from drinking! In a few years, we discovered that the "cure" of Prohibition was worse than the disease it purported to treat - and we stopped.

It took fourteen years for our nation to realize that the Eighteenth Amendment was a mistake, and that prohibition of alcohol didn’t work. We’ve been fighting the “War of Drugs” for at least 40 years. How long will it take us to relearn the same lesson?

Politics and Anarchy

In the last several weeks, there have been a shocking number of what I can only call terrorist attacks here in the U.S. An anti-choice protester murdered a doctor in a church. A Muslim convert murdered two soldiers. A racist bigot murdered a guard in the Holocaust Museum. All in such a short time…I began to wonder if our nation was truly headed for disaster in the form of sectarian strife and war.

Then I heard about the election in Iran.

It’s truly an illuminating counter-example. The election may, indeed, have been stolen by Ahmadinejad – so I certainly understand the urge to protest, even riot about the results. But it shows how weak the respect for the rule of law is in Iran as compared to our own society. After all, when’s the last time you heard of such massive demonstrations and widespread violence here?

One might assume that the difference is the importance of the event – a Presidential election, after all, is fairly significant, so would seem to inspire greater anger when it goes awry. I don’t think that’s the real difference, though. We’ve, arguably, had our own Presidential elections stolen. I believe that there is ample evidence that Bush supporters used fraud and other illegal means to change the outcome of the vote in Ohio in 2000, shifting those electoral votes from Gore to Bush, and thus changing the overall results for the nation – and that’s not even considering the travesty of Florida’s election that same year, or the unquestioned fact that Gore won the popular vote. A great many others believe that our current President is constitutionally unqualified for the office under the “natural born citizen” restriction – though I personally feel you have to look at the evidence through a blindfold to believe that nonsense.

Disagree with me? Think that Bush won fair and square, and Obama is secretly a Kenyan atheist Muslim Indonesian socialist criminal? Fine, leave me a comment and we can discuss it – but it doesn’t matter for this. The real point is that significant numbers of our population have reason to believe that one or more Presidential elections were stolen…and their responses to that were overwhelmingly non-violent. They write letters, post on blogs, complain around the water cooler, file hopeless lawsuits, whatever. What they don’t do is go out and riot.

And that’s the right answer. Frankly, even if those elections were stolen, I think the damage to our society from such anarchism is worse even than having a criminal occupy our nation’s highest office. Al Gore showed a similar belief when he quietly accepted the Supreme Court’s decisions against him that gave Bush the Presidency, as did John McCain in failing to support or even acknowledge the birther controversy.

In Iran and many other countries, the result of political disagreement is rioting and destruction. That trickles down – I once heard a military intelligence officer bemoan the difficulty of tracking terrorist incidents in Kosovo, because it was too hard to separate someone throwing a grenade at their neighbor’s house because they were the wrong ethnicity or religion from those throwing a grenade because the neighbor’s dog barked too long at night. It is a credit to our nation that the violent political statements of lone lunatics are significant enough to be noticed.

Torturing the Facts

I don't normally consider myself to be a liberal. My views range all over the left/right spectrum, and sometimes simply don't fit on that nice, neat two-dimensional graph. But over the last few years, the conservatives and Republicans have become so consistently illogical and dishonest that I find myself almost forced into a liberal mindset in reaction.

Cal Thomas' most recent editorial on releasing evidence of detainee abuse is an excellent case in point. In the course of his article, he sets up a strawman caricature of the liberal view and, of course, completely destroys it - while totally avoiding addressing any of the real issues involved. And even with that seemingly overwhelming advantage in his argument, he still seems to need deceptive tactics to make his point. I'd like to point out a few of the more glaring fallacies and deceptions.

"In any game, much less a war, when one player plays by a set of rules and the other plays by no rules at all, it does not take a genius to conclude who will win."

Of course, that assumes that the players are relatively equal. Frankly, the terrorists with whom we are "at war" are enormously weaker than the U.S. Thomas' statement implies that the only way we can win is to descend to the same level as the terrorists - and I don't really believe that to be the case.

"America-haters...want us to believe our behavior is directly linked to theirs and that if we don’t use techniques to extract information from suspected terrorists — information that might save American lives — then they won’t torture Americans who might have information they need to help them kill more of us."

Three lies for the price of one. First, it isn't the terrorists who are working the hardest to stop our use of torture. That would be counter-productive for them - as that use of torture is a huge boon to their PR and recruiting efforts. It is, instead, the liberals who want us to live up to our own principles. Second, their reason for trying to stop the torture is not to keep the terrorists from torturing our people - anyone with half a brain knows that won't happen, they're called "terrorists" for a reason. It is, instead, to turn that public relations bonanza around on them, restore us to our proper place as the morally superior side, and stop helping them recruit new fighters to kill our soldiers. And third, the idea that these techniques are necessary to extract information and save American lives is completely debunked. One of the interrogators has gone public, noting that traditional interrogation provided useful, actionable intelligence, while the "enhanced techniques" merely provided false answers, false leads, and wasted resources chasing them down.

Thomas quoted former CIA Director Peter Goss: "The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust."

No one is suggesting that releasing these memos and photos makes us safer. That's not the point. We should be using regular, legal interrogation techniques to make us safer - releasing these memos is to put a stop to the crimes committed by our own government.

He also quoted Mark Lowenthal, formerly with the CIA: "We ask people to do extremely dangerous things, things they’ve been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong. They don’t believe they have that cover anymore."

Frankly, they never should have believed they had "top cover." The Nuremberg Defense has been considered flawed for decades - and all U.S. military personnel (and, presumably, CIA personnel) know that they have an obligation to refuse illegal orders. And these techniques are clearly illegal - waterboarding, for instance, is a technique borrowed from the North Koreans, who used it to elicit false confessions from captured American prisoners. We have prosecuted enemy soldiers in the past, for using waterboarding on our troops. Should we now assume that it is legal simply because it has become convenient for us?

The facts are that these techniques are torture. They violate our own laws, they violate our international treaties, they make us appear as bad as our enemies, and in so doing, provide some level of justification for their further attacks on us. While Cal Thomas and other conservative columnists want us to believe that "the ends justify the means," it turns out that even if we accept that horrible ethical standard, it still isn't justified - because the means of torture produce huge amounts of false information...which keeps us from recognize any truth that might accidentally slip out.

Cal Thomas knows all this. Why is he defending the indefensible?

Unintended Consequences?

My adopted state of Georgia is considering an amendment to the state constitution. I quote from the Georgia General Assembly website:

Paragraph XXIX. Paramount right to life. (a) The rights of every person shall be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. The right to life is the paramount and most fundamental right of a person.

(b) With respect to the fundamental and inalienable rights of all persons guaranteed in this Constitution, the word 'person' applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, race, sex, health, function, or condition of dependency, including unborn children at every state of their biological development, including fertilization.

Now, the obvious intent of this amendment is to make abortion illegal – in fact, it would immediately include abortion under the definition of premeditated murder. I have to wonder, however, if the proponents of this amendment have fully considered the other consequences of the wording. I’m not a lawyer, of course, but it seems to me that under this amendment:

• Engaging in some action that causes a miscarriage could be charged as involuntary manslaughter, even if the woman didn’t previously know she was pregnant. That could apply to any number of women in highly physical professions – notably including members of the military, police forces, and fire departments.
• Any pregnant woman who has an alcoholic drink is guilty of child endangerment, providing alcohol to a minor, and child abuse. This could also be charged retroactively – a woman who drinks every weekend could be charged with eight separate counts of those crimes when she discovers she is two months pregnant.
• Likewise, a pregnant woman who smokes is guilty of child endangerment and child abuse – again, potentially retroactively.
• Intra-uterine devices, which are designed to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall, would be illegal. Putting one in and then having sex might be chargeable as murder. It goes without saying that the “morning after pill” would be equally restricted.
• The wording also seems a little unclear – it could be argued that this amendment protects the unborn child even during the act of fertilization itself. This would make ANY form of birth control equivalent to murder.

This amendment would also have interesting effects on Living Wills and other “right to death” issues – if the “inviolable,” “paramount,” and “most fundamental” right is life, then it seems unlikely that anyone could choose to take actions to end a life, no matter how heroic the measures required to continue it. But the consequences I find most interesting are the ones surrounding embryos – it seems that they would serve to sharply curtail various rights that women have taken for granted for decades, while affecting men slightly, if at all. Remember that this was written by professional lawmakers, with staff available to analyze these issues. I suppose it is possible that all these consequences to women are unintended…but I don’t really believe it.

Heroes

I found out about four heroes yesterday.

Three of them were wounded in Iraq. One was hit by an IED, and lost one leg below the knee. Another was hit by shrapnel, receiving damage to his arm and torso, with one piece penetrating his liver. The third was blown from his position in his HMMWV’s gun turret when a car bomb went off next to it. He flew 50 feet through the air and came down, impaled on a fence post. He was, fortunately, not hit in the ensuing firefight that delayed his treatment.

None of those horrific incidents make them heroes – at least, no more than any other volunteer Soldier who is over there right now, bearing the same risks. They merely had the bad luck to be one of those for whom the risks became reality. No, their heroic acts came later – which is how I met them. All three have declined medical discharge or retirement, and are currently performing duties at a major Army command near Washington D.C. Their willingness to stay in uniform to accomplish necessary duties here frees up three other Soldiers to perform necessary duties elsewhere.

The fourth hero’s acts have little to do with combat. SPC Jeremy Hall is a Soldier. He is also an atheist. While in Iraq last Thanksgiving, he declined to join hands and pray when others around him formed a prayer circle to say grace. Challenged by the ranking NCO, he explained his beliefs, and was ordered to find somewhere else to sit. Bravely, SPC Hall refused the illegal order and stayed put.

Last month, SPC Hall asked for permission from his chaplain to hold a meeting for fellow atheists and other free-thinkers. The chaplain, realizing his duties towards ALL Soldiers, including atheists, granted his request. However, his supervisor, MAJ Paul Welborne, intruded on the meeting, disrupted the discussion, and verbally attacked the attendees. In particular, he threatened SPC Hall with criminal charges and a bar to reenlistment, simply because SPC Hall had organized a meeting that offended the Major’s religious beliefs.

SPC Hall, with the assistance of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has filed suit against MAJ Welborne, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and the Department of Defense. He isn’t asking for money – instead, he’s only asking for an injunction on those parties to prevent them from interfering with other’s religious beliefs. Or lack thereof.

I don’t know if his suit has any chance of success. I do know that, no matter what the outcome, he is likely to receive retribution in any number of ways, from any number of people. There will be Soldiers angry at him for challenging the military structure, and causing damaging news stories. They will be Soldiers angry at him for challenging their fundamentalist religious beliefs, and their intent to evangelize. There will most certainly be Soldiers angry with him for BOTH reasons, and sooner or later, some of them will be his immediate supervisor, or his first sergeant, or his commander. If he chooses to stay in, he’s likely to have a rough career. If he chooses to get out, any potential civilian employer who Googles his name will find it – and may illegally choose not to hire him for his beliefs. In fact, the threat may be both more severe, and more immediate. In a response to my e-mail of support, SPC Hall told me he has already received threats of violence.

With all these reasons to swallow his anger and his principles, he has instead chosen to stand up for them. In this, he has been true to his oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and amply demonstrated three of the Army Values: Selfless Service, Integrity, and Personal Courage. He won’t get a medal for it…but he’s a hero, nonetheless.

Nutball Bait (Kevin, are you there?)

One of the reasons I've been blogging even less than normal lately is that I've been frequenting someone else's blog, instead. Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars presents five or so entries daily, usually about the conflicts between science and religion, civil rights and religion, civil rights and security measures, and so on. Not only are the posts interesting, but the regular readers and commenters are mostly a remarkably civil and literate bunch. I've been having a fine time adding my own opinions to theirs - and it's a lot more fun to argue with people who argue back.
Mind you, sometimes a less desirable debater comes along. In a recent post, I foolishly offered to provide a spot for a nutball named Kevin to spew his brand of vitriol, and for myself and others to point out his errors, or at least improve his grammar. I did this to keep a long, rambling argument thread out of Ed's blog, since he tries to keep the comment threads at least vaguely related to the entry to which they're linked. That's what this post is for - a starting point for the argument. I don't really expect him to show up, because he got rather soundly trounced on what little content his initial comments contained, and he hasn't been back. But just in case - here it is, Kevin, go nuts. Anyone who shows up here that isn't a Culture Wars regular is encouraged to go back and check out that post - and for that matter, the rest of Ed's blog.

Our Days Are Numbered

There will come a time when every human on Earth is dead.

The only questions are when and how.

Nuclear holocaust. If a global thermonuclear war happens, then the resulting clouds of fallout could kill most of those who lived through the blasts. Anyone who manages to avoid that might starve trying to find uncontaminated food supplies. Even if that problem is solved, they might find themselves with no healthy mate, thus preventing the next generation. And if they pass all those hurdles, then their reproductive organs might be damaged enough to prevent viable offspring.

That could happen tomorrow. On the other hand, it could have happened yesterday, or thirty years ago, and it hasn’t yet. There is at least some hope that it won’t happen at all. In any event, there may yet be time for other options.

Global Warming. A few degrees one way or the other won’t kill off humanity, but there’s no real reason it has to stop there. It is at least vaguely possible that the greenhouse effect could feed on itself and become a runaway. For the end result of that, take a look at Venus – surface temperatures averaging over 860° F. It’s going to be hard for anyone to stay alive in temperatures too hot for baking.

This one isn’t real likely – the theory of global warming is fairly well-established, and there’s not much room in it for a runaway greenhouse effect. On the other hand, theory is not a substitute for testing – and this test could have a very high learning curve.

Ice Age Maximus. Current theories in physics indicate that nuclear fusion produces neutrinos. These faster-than-light particles are hard to spot – they’ve got a 50% chance of getting through a light-year thickness of lead. Nonetheless, there are theoretical means of capturing them, and sites constructed to do just that – capture the neutrino’s produced by the Sun’s fusion. Unfortunately, they haven’t found any. This leads to a few possible conclusions, but one is that the nuclear furnace of our nearest star has gone out.

That would mean that all that light and heat we currently enjoy is just the remnants of earlier fusion percolating up through those thousands of miles of compressed gas – and that at any time now, it could stop. If that happens, it’s gonna get chilly. Not just the ice caps expanding and glaciers forming. Not just the oceans freezing over. I’m talking about the atmosphere freezing out, one gas at a time – a layer of dry ice, buried under a blanket of frozen nitrogen, with drifts of oxygen settling out on top. I’m talking about trying to choose between breathing frozen air or breathing vacuum – not that your choice will make a lot of difference.

This is another one that could happen at any time. But again, it hasn’t happened yet.

Various other methods – a massive comet strike could crack the Earth like a coconut. The Sun’s fusion might restart, igniting a massive solar flare that would blast our atmosphere off the surface, frying half the planet instantly while the other half struggled – briefly – with storms that would make a hurricane look like a summer breeze. A bioweapon gone wrong that wipes out such a high percentage of humanity that the few survivors die of other diseases, infrastructure collapses, or simply can’t find each other to reproduce and keep us going. If nothing else, the Sun will eventually expand to a red giant, turning the Earth to a charred cinder similar to Mercury.

There will come a time when every human on Earth is dead.

It would be nice if my descendents lived somewhere else when that happens.