Monday, November 22, 2010

Yale Law l: The Irony of Abundance

In applying to Yale law school I was required to submit a 250 word essay on any give topic. Below is the first essay amongst my the three finalists:

The New York Times recently published an article exploring the problematic implications of rampant technological use on the brains of high school students. Yet, the source of the problem is not the abundance and pervasiveness of technology, such as Facebook, smart-phones, and I-pads, but rather its misuse.While our technological age has opened the floodgates of information that was once the privilege of the elite, it has also, ironiclly, created a problem of too much information. But the irony of abundance is not limited to technology. The abundance of food -itself a result of technological knowhow- has created a plethora of unimaginable dilemmas for Americans. Whereas as once our society was afflicted with starvation now we are burdened by over-sized guts and an epidemic of obesity related health problems that kill more Americans each year than malnutrition ever did.

How is it that our society has so abused the abundance we have achieved? Instead of leveraging the, relatively cheap, abundance of healthy produce to engender a well nourished and healthy society we have used an economy of scale to create fast food that unhealthier than it is cheap.. Instead of gorging ourselves on the intellectual bounty of C-span and PBS, we have squandered our access to knowledge on YouTube, online porn, and yellow journalism.

But, like nuclear energy, we must embrace abundance however terrible our failure to choose correctly is. True the higher we climb the greater the fall, but technology is value neutral. It offers us the choice to choose greatness, to actualize the positive inherent in the irony of abundance.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Get Your Hands off Our Collective Junk and Start Profiling!

"Get your hands off my junk, or I will have you arrested!".

This is one version of the refrain that it being spoken, or shouted, across the nation. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been authorized by a Homeland Security directive to place full body scanners in many of America’s airports. Yes that's rights, now, when you shuffle by JFKs security check, it will not only be the holes in your socks that are "exposed", but also the most private of your private property.

Of course you can opt-out and be subjected to a thorough hands-on grouping.

When confronted with this impossible choice, many just shrug their heads or murmur that is the better of two evils, the other being a terrorist attack. Yet I wonder does this approach really increase our security?

I mean Israel faces a much more consistent threat and has an airline security apparatus that is the envy of the modern world, so why don't they grope and expose? Yes Israel is a tiny country and, with only one major international airport, it faces much less of a logistical problem. But given that HS measures are so intrusive, should we not do everything possible to avoid them, especially considering their obvious logical flaws?

I mean in Israel, (and I apologize for continuing to return to them as the paradigm, but they understand terror) there are checkpoints at the entrance to the airport. This is because terrorists will target any location with high density human populations -malls, trains, restaurants etc. In other words "exposing" Americans does not in the least prevent terror; on the contrary it surrenders to it.

Yes terrorists have a special incentive to specifically bomb plains so as to undermine our economic viability, but Israel has dealt with that without fondling every visitor and citizen.
Put otherwise, the TSA's actions are both unnecessary and don't work.

So why is our increasingly inept government reaching into our pants, this time through the zipper?
Undoubtedly some, you know who you are, will respond that the corporations, and politicians desperate for local job creation, are pushing for the acceptance of these secularized porn flick apparatuses. Ok, but we can just as easily employ private security firms, similar to Blackwater, to help ensure our security.

I know what you’re thinking:

That this suggestion just brings us back to square one, and standard TSA practices are failing.
Yes but that’s not what I mean. You see I think the TSA can do its job and do it as effectively as Israel. All we need to do is profile.

When I brought this up with a Muslim friend he was aghast, and I don't blame him. But the profiling system that Israel uses is a lot more sophisticated and accurate, then just identifying and separating Middle-Eastern/Muslim faces from the crowd. Think the show "Don't Lie to Me", coupled with a comprehensive computer system that integrates million of disparate pieces of information into a near perfect assessment of individual fliers.

For instance, prior to the x-ray baggage check on international flights to Israel, EVERY customer is subjected to a brief but friendly interrogation. The answers are evaluated not only by their content but also by delivery. Obviously this is only one small part in a multi-layered process that is very expensive. But so are those machines and the privacy they violate.

It all boils down to whether our society is so frightened by the term profiling that we are willing to give up exactly that which we are afraid of loosing with government profiling: our autonomy, privacy, and self-respect.

If you ask me get your hands off our collective junk and start profiling!

Divorce is Good?!

HuffingtonPost.com, the self proclaimed left wing response to drudgereport.com and co.,(http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45168.html) recently launched its newest addition to string of highly specialized categories, divorce. Its founder, Ariana Huffington, claimed that she was prompted by the statistic that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. It's an astute idea. After all divorce is part of the fabric of our society and America needs a forum for the growing discussion.

Yet I was taken aback by the direction in which many of the contributors on her site were going. One op-ed "Divorce! It’s good for the children!" by http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/divorce-its-good-for-the-_b_782469.html Jane Smiley, argues that divorce can be good.

But is it?

Ok, I understand that many in our society attempt to go with the flow. When they recognize a societal trend they respond with non-judgmental acceptance, i.e. instead of attributing meaning to a given development they just recognize it and report on it. I appreciate the importance of presenting objective-oriented information.

However, I perceive more than just aloof coverage, by contributors to Huffingtonpost.com, of a news-worthy story. Instead, it seems that many who gravitate to this media platform are attempting to justify the trend. Instead of offering an unadulterated statistic to their audience these writers are attempting to reshape an historically negative event (even when justified), divorce, into a positive activity.

The arguments are boring, but non-the-less should be considered.

1. we live in a post-marriage society
2.marriage works for some and not for others.
3. marriage vis-a-vis same sex couples and singles is exclusionary.

I can accept that religious grounded argument for marriage (such as the refrain that "love is a part of marriage, not marriage") often have a minimal impact in the secular public sphere and are already discounted as antiquated and/or myth. Never mind that religious communities of all types are also experiencing relative increases in divorce rates. I can even see why many proponents of divorce discount the anecdotal evidence as to the ravages of broken, uh I mean separated families. I live in Crown Heights, where gang affiliation is often directly attributed to absentee parents. Just as my classmates, of divorced parents, in my hometown of suburban CT. seemed, perhaps mistakenly, to have their own genre of problems (who doesn't right!?).
Still I'm sure many divorced parents and their children are neither gang-bangers or in therapy.

Fine, I can understand all these perspectives.

Furthermore, we may never know whether rampant divorce is a symptom of a larger cultural problem, or just another seminal development in an increasingly changing society.
But at the same time it may be cause for serious concern even for those who feel that our capitalistic mindset requires a materialistic reason to gain our attention.

So I ask: Do the implications of increasing divorce rates have a direct impact on our economic welfare?

What if it is not a mere coincidence that the 1960's liberal revolution and the increasing divorce that came with it, was also the decade when real income reached its peak and has since declined? What if having an economically stable home to turn to (yes two adults living in one location are more likely to accumulate resources to share with others) in times of distress and need, helps strengthen the fabric of our national psyche and, by virtue of that, our productivity? What if your divorce precludes your children from marrying, which negatively impacts the economic environment that we ALL live in? Do the inherent responsibilities of a successful marriage inculcate its members, especially its children, with a sense of monetary responsibility, credit cards and all?

If huffingtonPost.com is going to publish articles justifying societies divorce from marriage than, for the sake of the greater good, it should also explore the ramifications of a society without marriage.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Gingrich, Clinton, China, and the Tea Party: Two Thoughts on the New Political Landscape

The Gingrich-Clinton Paradox:

Do you remember the good old days...I don't but they tell me they were really good. Every family could have an avocado on their table and every child a cell-phone under their desk. Credit cards were more numerous then dollar bills and China's 40 plus 4 million people cities were not swiftly replacing the memory of a towerless ground zero.

Yet what I wish to remember most is the time when the staunchly conservative speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich, and a Democratic stalwart, Bill Clinton worked together, and succeeded.
Yes Clinton was fulfilling the fantasy of many an aspiring politician. Yes the Republican controlled house, it turns out, had much of its own corrupt political figures. But the country was succeeding and our political class was not getting in the way.

Why?

I am sure some political theorist will pontificate about how I reversed the cause and the effect -it was a booming economy despite the government not because of the government.

However one can just as easily make the argument that the political class had an incentive to work together, and that their work facilitated the nations growth.

The Democrats recent control of both the house and the executive exemplifies this paradox:

As the Executive and the legislative branch were politically homogenous, the republican minority did all it could to obstruct and undermine the majority. They then blamed the majority for their failures despite claiming that "the majority had a real chance, they controlled it all, and blew it". True a minority that is focused on obstruction can be a serious impediment to the majorities success, but the public doesn’t see it that way, and that’s what counts.

On the other hand if there is a legislative-executive split, every party has a real and, even more importantly, obvious stake in success. Obvious, because the public is aware of their control/responsibility. It is one thing for politicians (in this case the republicans) to argue that they were "kept out of the process" as the minority, it is another thing, entirely, to fail when in control.

Now that the the GOP controls the house, can Obama get things done?

I think yes.

Why?

Because now both parties are in power and have a stake in the success of the political class they control. Think Clinton and Newt Gingrich's' "contract with America". In this case it is Obama and the "Take back America"/Tea party.

In short the recent political developments are conducive to plentiful avocados and credit, (I hope this time it will be debit cards) cards. Yes it may be as simple as restoring the the check on the balance. Or, if you will, the reemergence of the Newt Gingrich-Clinton paradox.

Tea-party Ideology May be Good for China Too:

Obama's visit to Americas four major Democratic allies in the region -Indonesia, India, Japan, and South Korea- all of which serve, in part, to hedge in China's spreading power, converts wide-spread public condemnation of China in congress into action.
This makes sense.

Besides China's abysmal human rights record, its menacing attitude to many of Americas Asian allies, and its implicit support for nuclear proliferation/bad actors, in Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, China is also an aggressive if not unscrupulous global competitor. Of course America is not free of its own foibles and out-right blunders, but I believe in America not China.

Still, despite the rhetoric surrounding currency manipulation and the PLC's increasingly anti-American indoctrination -both issues that the tea-party targeted in their campaign- the tea-parties ascendancy can be interpreted as beneficial to China.

Yes I know that Republicans are perceived as strong on defense-spending and war (please see post on http://factoru.blogspot.com/2010/04/republicans-and-democrates-herd.html) issues that are inherently threatening to China.

But republicans are also against protectionism, cap-on-trade, and pro free-markets.
Even more China gains from an austerity prone House, after all cuts in spending will strengthen the dollar; a dollar that China is invested in to the tune of 1 trillion dollars.