Taxes and Death

For those of you who may want a slight chill with your daily edification, I suggest visiting the Smoking Gun website (www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html) to read the six page rant of that guy (who shall hereinafter be disrespectfully referred to as "The Ass") who flew his plane into the building in Austin, Texas with the IRS office in it. The Ass' selfless act of patriotism resulted in his death and the death of one Vernon Hunter, a Vietnam veteran with two decades of service in the American Army and a father of six, who also happened to be employed by the IRS. Let me say that none of this is the least bit humorous to any sane person and my sarcasm is intended to be biting, but there are more than a few laughable ironies in the Ass' disjointed, irrational, whiney, self-pitying, polemical diatribe against the inconveniences of modern life.

I hardly know where to begin with a critique of the Ass' attempt to justify cold-blooded murder, but for the most part it is a lamentation on the fact that the big fish eat the little fish and that ignorance of the law is no excuse. This is hardly news to us little fish, or first year law students, so it is difficult to see how the Ass is so surprised by it. The Ass seems to have an issue with the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church, and rails against its corruption, which was my first clue that he might not have a complete set of cutlery, but let's be for real; nobody gives a rat's ass about the Catholic Church; even Catholics don't give a rat's ass about the Catholic Church. However, I am going to resist labeling the guy as a nut (which was my first impulse, over "Ass") because that smacks of patronizing Soviet era perversion of the mental health system to marginalize those who have the gall to disagree. Just because somebody has goofy ideas and believes in pixy dust doesn't mean they are crazy, and assigning the "crazy" label to them often just serves to excuse the inexcusable and allows their instigators and co-conspirators to distance themselves from their handy-work.

Reading between the lines and extrapolating from vague references, it appears that some years ago the Ass got involved in some sort of scam to avoid paying taxes and got bitch-slapped by the IRS. He refers to it "costing him $40,000 and 10 years of his life", so apparently the IRS didn't take very kindly to being trifled with. He later talks about his accountant being a retard and screwing up his taxes such that the IRS was again hounding him (it is interesting to note that he didn't kill the accountant). If you feel there is a consistent theme emerging, you are correct; the Ass was periodically not paying his taxes in a timely manner or in an adequate amount, so he got in a world of shit. Anybody that has ever had an issue with the IRS knows how disheartening that can be, but only a very small percentage of citizens with tax issues actually crash planes into IRS offices. The balance of the six pages is a recounting of personal business failures, criticism of government and the stupidity of the nation's citizens, references to divorce and remarriage, and hating on GM executives for "unthinkable atrocities". I am of the opinion that GM executives have clearly manufactured some unthinkable atrocities over the years, for example, the Pontiac Starfire, but I'm not sure that is essentially a moral issue.

The Ass goes on to conclude that "violence is the only answer", although he really never defines the question. If violence is the only answer to bureaucratic inefficiency and divergent opinions in a pluralistic society, then we are in a real mess. If violence is the only answer to alienation and frustration resulting from rapid social change, then we are completely screwed. If violence is the only answer to not being able to tell the difference between maintenance of social order and totalitarian oppression, then let the chaos begin. I don't imagine there are many people who enjoy paying taxes and I have grave reservations about what the government does with a lot of the money I am compelled to give them, but the Ass' research into the philosophical foundation of our republic apparently didn't include the concept of the social contract or the preamble to the Constitution. We probably do need more equity in our tax structure and we certainly need to get our national spending under control, but killing Vernon Hunter is not likely to achieve either.

I have seen some reports of various political figures who say "we, of course, condemn the violence, but we empathize with the plight of the Ass." Should we empathize with intellectual mediocrity and border-line personality disorder? Should we identify with not knowing when to admit you've made a mistake? Should we validate a self-pitying sense of entitlement to positive outcomes? These are all conditions that cause me to whack my children in the side of the head when observed; I can hardly endorse them in the general public. Actually, the Ass' manifesto reads just like my 17 year-old trying to explain how he had time to sneak out, take the car without permission, and visit his girlfriend until two in the morning, but he couldn't find the time to complete his project for history class. Why would any responsible person say anything other than that the Ass is a complete bozo and his tortured self-justification has no merit in a civilized society? Why indeed.

In America, attitudes about the relationship between citizens and their government are ambivalent at best. This nation was conceived of frustration and delivered through violence, and suspicion of authority is just as strong now as it was in King George's day. We want to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, but we have a hard time accepting the social obligation necessary to achieve the objective. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, when responsibility is abandoned with the aim of increased freedom, a nation shall have neither. This is not 1776; we have a system which many have given their lives for which allows us to accept responsibility for ourselves and control the governance of our nation. The system is not broken; we are, and self-righteousness, impatience and murder don't make you a hero, they just make you an Ass.

Please Leave A Message After the Beep

I just read an article in the current edition of “The Skeptic” magazine, a fine publication for those who actually like to consider the facts before making absurd declarations, or perhaps even for those who actually use facts to avoid making absurd declarations. This particular article discussed a proposal associated with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program (SETI) to send high energy laser pulses out into space as a message to any technological civilizations which might be watching. I would like to keep the story straight (why start now, you ask?), but I don’t have the article in front of me and cannot recall the author’s name; however, his basic theme was that we should give it a lot of thought before we actively seek to announce our presence to a galaxy potentially full of completely unknown creatures, civilizations and behavioral norms.

We have, of course, been leaking radio signals in a wide range of frequencies out into space for some time now. Mr. Marconi’s first signals should be reaching the orange giant Iota Cephei about right now, but radio waves diffuse quickly and may be indistinguishable from interstellar background noise at a distance, hence the laser idea. In December of 2008, an Australian astrophysicist observed a decidedly nonrandom pulse in the laser frequency range emanating from the night sky, and he and others have been scanning the same area of space almost nightly since. While it is not possible to say what exactly the signal was, astronomers believe communicating by laser over the vast distances between stars makes more sense than radio waves because of the coherence of the beam and ease in distinguishing it from background noise. The real question is, does it make sense for us to attempt to attract the attention of our galactic neighbors?

For those of us who grew up on Star Trek, Star Wars and the Outer Limits, we are pretty much used to the anthropomorphic intelligent alien that displays the standard range of human failures like greed, alcoholism and offensive body odor. We tend to create our aliens as we create our gods, in our own image. Some are loving and merciful; some are jealous and destructive, but for the most part they have practical limitations in their technology, resources and ambition, just like us. Occasionally we conjure up the more indecipherable extraterrestrial, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith wielding phantoms who rescue the emotionally fragile HAL from certain doom, but these aliens are not generally useful metaphors for human self-analysis and there is not much box-office appeal in the Godzilla vs. Bambi scenario of infinitely scientifically superior alien civilizations. We prefer to imagine hard drinking Klingons or, at worst, creepy scorpion-lizard things lurking in the Nostromo’s bowels. The problem is, since we are the only example of a technological civilization that we have, there is no basis upon which to extrapolate probability with respect to what intelligent aliens would be all about.

So, is it really smart to broadcast our social security number and mother’s maiden name out into the cosmic void? How do we know that the sentient beings potentially listening are nice people? What if they want to eat us? Most people that speculate about these things have speculated that civilizations advanced enough to engage in interstellar communication will probably be trustworthy, but we humans are currently contemplating interstellar communication and I wouldn’t trust the human race any farther than I could throw Jupiter, especially not under the stress of contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Many respectable persons have further speculated that an alien race capable of physical contact with us, whether in person or through their mechanical representatives, would have to be so advanced that their moral refinement would be assured. While this sounds like a truly lovely sentiment, there is no empirical way to test such an assumption other than phoning E.T.’s home and waiting for an answer, and then you’re committed. Evolution by natural selection implies a certain cruel logic and the citizens of any technological civilization orbiting some distant star would most certainly be descendents of creatures with sharp teeth, as are we.

Another point of view, which I find ironically comforting, is that any civilization advanced enough to contact us (i.e. visit us, enslave us, blow us up, etc.) would find us completely useless and uninteresting and would therefore not bother to pick up the phone. Some speculate that any aliens capable of spanning the unfathomable distances between stars have probably already scouted us out and moved on to something more worthwhile. Others suggest that we are all by our lonesome in God’s infinite creation, or at least that life is so rare and the Universe is so huge that there is little to no probability that any spacemen will find us, or that we will find them, within the probable life of human civilization. Any, or even most, of these things could be true. We don’t know, but it could also be true that the Borg have already picked up the signal and the invasion fleet is on the way.

A lot of people will probably find this whole discussion to be pointless; why would we be worrying about aliens when the world’s environment and economy are shot to hell? Many likely think SETI is a waste of taxpayer money, which it certainly is not, if only because it is completely privately funded, but no doubt the question of alien contact is not currently a priority to the average person. However, whether or not we should attempt to signal alien civilizations is to me a very important question, not as a specific debate about the potential risks or rewards of such a course of action, but because of what it says about how we see ourselves and our position in the cosmological order. If the truth be told, the average American would probably say that we are ready to take our rightful place in the galactic community and, with a little technological assistance from the Vulcans, we will quickly be up to speed on promoting truth and justice amongst the stars. I don’t know what the average Cambodian would think, but in general humanity could probably do with a humbling experience beyond the failure of global financial institutions. I am in favor of blasting the laser signal throughout the heavens in the hope that some polite and well dressed aliens will stop by and inform us of what a third-world hell-hole Earth is, with rampant disease, pervasive poverty and a truly staggering level of mindless violence, and when we inquire as to the solution to these problems they will say “quit being assholes” and fly away. It could happen.

Black and White, Sort Of

You may not believe it, but sometimes things just don’t make much sense. For example, in my on-going search for arcane and trivial information about our arcane and trivial world, I came across a reference to a report published by the Red Cross entitled “Through Albino Eyes - The plight of albino people in Africa’s Great Lakes region and a Red Cross response.” (http://www.ifrc.org/docs/pubs/discrimination/AlbinoPDF4.pdf). This informative 13 page report full of glossy pictures and a lovely map basically informs us that the albinos of Burundi and Tanzania are being murdered for their body parts. What is just a touch weird is that their kidneys are not being stolen for rich Africans on dialysis and the perpetrators are not brain-hungry zombies, but rather the albinos are victims of freelance ghouls who supply an occult demand for the supposedly magical pieces of albinos. The report says that the albino body parts are thought by some to bring wealth and luck. This seems somewhat counter-intuitive to me, since the previous owner of the parts didn’t experience a positive outcome, but who am I to argue with the wisdom of ignorance.

Albinism is a genetic condition resulting from the body’s failure to produce an enzyme necessary to the production of the pigment melanin. It affects all vertebrates to some extent and is generally characterized by its sufferers looking a little pink. In humans, albinism is associated with increased risk of sun damage to skin and the advent of skin cancer, as well as increased sensitivity to light and various vision problems. Albinism is not known to be related to other health concerns, unless you happen to live in Tanzania, but looking sort of like a weird, pinkish vampire thing must present a host of social challenges. About one in 17,000 people has some form of albinism.

Albinism is statistically no more pronounced in Burundi and Tanzania than elsewhere and there is no previous tradition of albinos being dismembered for lucky charms, but for some unknown reason (according to the report) the demand for the body parts of albinos has recently exploded. The Red Cross speculates that this is the result of a sophisticated marketing campaign by witch doctors in the region, launched in response to difficult economic times. The basic strategy, which we have seen with things like Crocs, Hello Kitty and vanity surgery, is to convince you that you cannot live without something useless and often repulsive. Apparently Exxon and the Hair Club for Men have nothing on our brothers in the rural paradise of Central Africa when it comes to amoral profit mongering. The report states that “a complete set of albino body parts, including all four limbs, genitals, ears, tongue and nose” goes for about $75,000. It would seem that anybody than can afford to spring for the full Monty in a country where the annual per capita Gross Domestic Product is $1400.00 probably doesn’t need a good luck charm, but hey, some people are greedy.

The result of this recent uptick in the albino parts market is, of course, a modicum of unease on the part of the region’s albinos. Let’s face it; if you are an albino in Equatorial Africa, it is probably a difficult proposition to go unnoticed. It should also be noted that there is a very good reason that most of Africa’s denizens are dark-skinned and albinos in Burundi and Tanzania already have a tough row to hoe between the unforgiving sun and looking somewhat less than standard, so being hunted for your body parts adds considerable insult to injury. Many of the region’s albinos are in hiding; many have been abandoned by their families due to the security risk they pose and many are wards of the region’s charitable organizations. The albinos in Burundi and Tanzania already often die in early adulthood due to skin cancer, and they experience reduced educational and employment opportunities because of vision issues, so murder and dismemberment is just another step along the happy trail to heaven.

I’m not really sure what we can do about all this; certainly giving the Red Cross some money would be a good start, but the world is so full of misery I often despair about correcting any of it. Following in Pope Kiril’s footsteps, I could liquidate all my worldly holdings and perhaps make some brief improvement in the lives of a few, but my wife and children would probably take exception and only about 37 percent of it would eventually reach the intended target, not to mention that I am likely already too addicted to comfort to give it up, no matter how superficially dismayed I am at the plight of the albinos. There is, however, one relatively painless course of action which may be of benefit, at least in the long run. Let’s all just decide to quit believing in witches and ghosts and lucky talismans and salvation by grace and virgins in paradise and psychic detectives and the myriad other idiocies which confuse the weak-minded and comfort the charlatan. Let’s just put aside childish fantasy and be adults and leave the damned creepy looking albinos alone.

Baiji Doesn't Live Here Anymore

If you think it’s tough to find a meaningful relationship these days, consider poor Lipotes vexillifer, commonly known as the Yangtze River Dolphin, or Baiji. Perhaps “commonly known” is not the best way to put it since Lipotes vexillifer is functionally extinct. Functionally extinct is like in one of those science fiction stories when the sun is about to go nova and all life is going to be obliterated and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, but everybody is still standing around reflecting on the irony of humanity while trying to make amends for past transgressions and wishing they had followed their dreams instead of going into corporate accounting, except that there are only a precious few Yangtze River Dolphins remaining and they probably don’t find much irony in humanity. Actually there has been no confirmed sighting of the Baiji since 2007, so they may already be history, but whether there remains one or one-hundred; the sun has clearly set, if not exploded, on their twenty million year reign.

Dolphins are generally considered to be among the biosphere’s more intelligent citizens, but these particular dolphins had the fatally poor judgment to take up residence in the largest river in China. In defense of the Baiji’s wisdom, there was no China, and no humans, twenty million years ago, but, currently, almost one-eighth of the world’s population resides within the Yangtze River’s watershed. Of course, there is no way the Baiji could have anticipated this horrifying turn of events, but all this time evolving in the formerly pristine, fresh waters of the Yangtze has made it impossible for the Baiji to retreat to the relative safety of the ocean; hence, hasta la vista. Wikipedia says that “a traditional Chinese story describes the Baiji as the reincarnation of a princess who had been drowned by her family after refusing to marry a man she did not love”, but it will ultimately prove to be more a case of being drowned in a fishing net by men who were in love with themselves.

Yangtze River Dolphins typically only birth one calf, usually every other year, so you cannot say they reproduce prolifically. With a life span in the wild of around 24 years, the female Baiji reaches sexual maturity at about six years, so if she lives a normal life span and hooks up regularly, she will birth around nine children (compare this to about 850 for a rat and about 2.5 for a human). Unfortunately the attrition rate from the aforementioned fishing nets and the habitat destruction and prey eradication caused by pollution, dredging and damns, and the increasingly hazardous boat traffic and noise pollution which renders the dolphin’s sonar useless, have outpaced the Baiji’s ability to reproduce and resulted in the irreversible decline of the species. It appears that the Yangtze River Dolphin, like all other dolphins, spends its life mostly swimming around and eating fish. It often cooperates with others of its kind to hunt and it spends an inordinate amount of time just goofing off; it is clearly capable of complex communication and learning, but we humans do not really know the extent to which there is a transmitted dolphin “culture” or whether dolphins are truly self-aware in the same neurotic way humans are, so we don’t know if they know they are alone and doomed and that we have made them so.

I’m not going to bash our fine Chinese friends about all this; after all, they have blessed us with the Cultural Revolution and forced sterilization, and virtually every piece of consumer electronics we have bought in the past decade, but I do wonder why the world’s aspiring powers tend to only imitate the bad parts of the American character. The ironically named People’s Republic has largely abandoned socialism for predatory capitalism replete with industrial pollution and exploitation of the proletariat without so much as lip service to freedom of conscience, or even the practical, egalitarian wisdom of Confucius. The loss of the Yangtze River Dolphin is just another material input into the Long March to Chinese economic hegemony and the transformation of the Chinese people into almond-eyed clones of their obese, self-indulgent and obtuse American role models. Maybe it wasn’t habitat destruction after all; maybe the Baiji just died of shame.

Sarah Palin is Not Black

Daily KOS Research 2000 recently published the results of a national poll of 2000 “self-identified Republican voters”. Forty-two percent of the respondents resided in the “South”, wherever that is, and 11 percent call the “Northeast” home. Daily KOS probably has no relationship to the Daily Show and the KOS webpage says they are an “online political community”, but most of their contributors are identified as “progressive”, which means either that they are more likely to favor Democrats or that whatever is wrong with them is getting worse. I am certainly progressive in both respects and hold no grudge against Daily KOS, but in fairness you have to consider the source of any information you use to bash Republicans.

Thirty-nine percent of the poll respondents indicated that they thought President Obama should be impeached. Twenty-nine percent were not sure and the remainder said “not yet” or something similar. This means that 68 percent of the respondents believe President Obama is black, I guess. Why 68 percent of the Republicans polled would suggest the President may be guilty of “high crimes or misdemeanors” is not immediately obvious, but one theory is that president Obama has failed to properly distance himself from the policies of his predecessor in office. The whole idea that impeachment should be used as a political strategy seems to be contrary to the concept of divided government and checks and balances and the 39 nine percent of Republicans favoring impeachment may not even know what the word means, but I think it says a lot about how our Republican friends view the use of political power.

Thirty-two percent of respondents indicate that they do not believe that the President was born in the United States and 22 percent are “not sure”. I would attribute this primarily to respondents failing fourth-grade geography, or perhaps the fact that the President is black. To date, there has been absolutely no evidence of any kind to indicate that Barrack Obama was born anywhere other than Hawaii and all attempts to document the falsehood have been revealed as erroneous or fraudulent. Of course, the President is very articulate and generally quite reasonable, so it is not hard to understand how someone might feel he wasn’t from around here.

The poll found that 31 percent of Republicans believe President Obama is “a racist who hates white people”, while 33 percent were “not sure” about this statement. Perhaps he just hates Republicans and said Republicans have confused themselves with all white people since all Republicans are white people. On the other hand, the President does not appear to be mustering hate for much of anything these days and he acts more like Professor Peabody than Sister Souljah. Being a white person, I am relatively certain that the President doesn’t hate me and he was probably fond of his mother, and grandmother, and his various other genetic relations who happen to meet the definition of white. Of course, logic means little to ignorant and angry people.

Sixty-three percent of respondents believe President Obama is a “socialist”. That’s probably why the President is so reluctant to throw money at Wall Street or why he has done so much to make banks accountable or why he has chosen the little guy over the corporations in healthcare reform efforts. Socialist? Really? If Barrack Obama is a socialist, I’m a female, Lithuanian midget with orange hair and seven toes on my right foot. Of course, the President is black…

Twenty-four percent of persons responding to the poll said the President “wants the terrorist to win”. I’m not sure what the terrorist want, so I don’t know what winning would look like to a terrorist, but if winning means religious authorities taking control of the government and forcing the people of a nation to adhere to the moral standards that those authorities impose, then President Obama probably doesn’t want the terrorists to win, but Pat Robertson and John Ensign probably do. If the terrorists winning means American soldiers coming home from foreign shitholes and America’s blood and money no longer being wasted killing Arabs and other assorted brown-skinned persons who have done little other than share a religion with a bunch of homicidal douche-bags, then I want the terrorists to win. Did I mention the President is black?

The poll goes on to reveal other important and informative facts about Republican attitudes, including that 23 percent of those polled felt their state should “secede from the union” and 76 percent believe or are not sure if “ACORN stole the 2008 Presidential election”. The Force is strong in that ACORN, they will bear watching. I started this self-indulgent rant of a blog 82 posts ago saying the collective IQ of the country would go up if Texas left, so if South Carolina and Mississippi want to go with them, all the better. If you don’t accept the principles of free thought and speech and the rule of law is less important to you than the rule of your own deranged opinion, then you probably do need to go found your own racist, voodoo theocracy where honest, hard-working people can be abused by lunatics and objective truth doesn’t matter; or just move to my home state, Georgia, way down south in Dixie.

Naturally, I saved the most instructive bit of wisdom for last. The poll indicates that 53 percent of respondents believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than the President. I have often commented on my puzzlement over the political viability of the former Governor of Alaska, pointing out her intellectual mediocrity, her self-promoting hypocrisy, her factual ignorance and her shape-shifting, politically adaptive principles. None of this seems to matter to large numbers of Republicans who would apparently rather see America led by the Moose Lady of Wasilla than the hated crypto-Muslim, foreign born, racist, socialist, terrorist loving Obama. And, oh, Sarah Palin’s not black.