But otherwise, yeah.  Most of the anti-immigration rhetoric follows some form of: “we only have _x_  jobs” or “our resources are limited.”  But this is not Kuwait.  We don’t all get a salary from the government based on some natural resource we’re selling to the world.  If you believe in the free enterprise system, a hard-working immigrant who has already gone through the dependent years is net gain to the economy.  This person brings in both skills and additional consumption.  Even if they send money to family at home, that still is a form of trade balance correction, you’re paying the whole family for service exported.  All is good.

But if you think of jobs and resources as a form of limited entitlement, then you’re in the socialist model.  Ergo, anti-immigration based on “scarce resources” = socialist thinking.

Those within the church are arguing about  justice and how this might affect the church as a whole.

There are those outside the church who are arguing about justice, crime, and cover-up.  But some have also taken it as a platform to debate the legitimacy and goodness/badness of the church itself.  I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.  I’m not Catholic.  By definition, I guess that means I don’t believe in the legitimacy of the church.  I also think, like any large institution that has dominated the last 2000 years of human history, it’s done a lot of harm and a lot of good.  Currently, I think they are actively working against third-world development with their policies on birth control.

But the Pope argument is completely unrelated.  Contrary to the beliefs of the mis-informed, the Pope is not infallible.  The only exception is when he speaks “ex cathedra”, which does not happen often.  Even if the Pope where infallible, that infallability would not logically extend backwards in time to decisions prior to becoming the Pope.  Also, what would infallability even mean?  That any decision made would be just and moral?  That it would lead to no possible bad outcome?  That it would be in accord with current human laws?  Or should all decisions lean more towards Church values, such as forgiveness and redemption?

The Pope did whatever he did.  Made some kind of decision about some level of information.  We don’t know what he really knew, but it’s natural for critics to apply all that we know now to someone who was described as knowing something at the time.  Even critics who keep claiming the crown of reason as something they own personally make this mistake.  But administrators make decisions all the time based on information they barely understand or can’t really trust.  And he was an administrator, looking at old information, on a topic that he may not have really understood the scope of.  Human beings tend to dismiss things we aren’t ready to deal with.  And administrators do that more than anyone.

Me and High Blood Pressure

I don’t manage risk well.  If you give me a bunch of facts and stats and ask me to change my behavior, good luck.  For the past couple years of been treating my high blood pressure by inconsistent attempts at diet, sleeping better, and getting some exercise.  Anything but medication.  It’s a bad decision, and I know it pretty well because my job is health information outreach.  I’ve optimized articles on hypertension for the Web.

What did it take to get me back on medication?  I think my cardiologist actually threatened me.  Also, he woudn’t sign off on something else I needed, (ADD medication).  My sister had a similar experience.  She’s taking her high blood pressure meds because, as she says “I think the doctor said he was actually going to give me a stroke if I didn’t.”

Arguably, since I am only managing my own risk, I’m morally superior to the parents who won’t get their kids vaccinated.  But the moral element isn’t what I’m after today, it’s the thought process and how it might be changed.  My daytime job is basically health outreach.  Getting good information about health into the hands of people that need it.  Often I think we’re too timid.  We don’t want to offend anyone.  This keeps us from telling stories in a way that works.

Kids Dying in Swimming Pools

But first, let’s back up.  Swimming pools kill people.  So do guns.  If you let your kids play at a house a swimming pool you increase their risk.  If you let your kids play at a house where there are guns, you  also increase risk for your child.  Stasticaly, the swimming pool is FAR more dangerous.  But we feel more outraged by the guns.  Why?  We’ve accepted drownings as part of life.  Unfortunate accidents.  We think of them as something that happens passively.  An accidental shooting is active.  Someone DID something.  There is more guilt, some of which will always splash back on the parents.

Just imagine two headlines, without any other facts:

Child Dies in Swimming Pool (add sub-head about tragic unfortunate accident)

Child Killed While Playing With Gun (add sub-head about “could have been prevented” or “poor supervision” maybe “charges pending”)

Both could actually be prevented with about the same level of safeguards and attention, but one we process as passive and one as active.

Now to the vaccines.  Injecting a child with something is active.  Infectious diseases are, like swimming pools, a passive threat.  They are an unfortunate reality.  Tragic, but it happens.  Dying from a vaccination is an active event.  No matter how “correct” the decision may have seemed, that death will feel like the fault of the parent.

But passive and active are constructive, like foreground and background.  It all depends on how the story is told.  Instead of timid recitations of facts, here is how I would do a campaign to encourage parents to vaccinate their children:

Parents Letting Kids Die

Two kids, sitting across the table from each other.  Between them, a gun.  Yes, they are playing Russian Roulette, and Yes, we do show them taking turns and putting the gun to their head, while the parents watch.  Finally, the gun goes off and the kid collapses with the symptoms of swine flu.

Final message? “Take the gun away, get your children vaccinated.”  See? We’ve now converted swine flu into an active risk, and responsibility splashes back on the parents.

If anyone steals this idea, I hope they put it to good use.

1) Perez Hilton is an annoying idiot who suddenly claims some kind of political relevancy?

2) Some 21 year old bimbo can’t walk a political tight-rope?

3) Beauty contest are basically displaying and rating female flesh, with a patina of respectability, and yet trashing the ones who’ve shown a millimeter more flesh?

I want to say, lay off the girl.  And I would, if she had gone back home, quietly stating that she didn’t think her beliefs should matter in a beauty contest.  But she didn’t, she signed on with “National Organization for Marraige”.  National Organization for Marraige is the worst kind of hate group, it goes all emo over people disagreeing with it.  Hating minorities and disempowered groups is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Probably in any country.  Our high schools are still permeated with it.  But the bullies used to at least have the guts to be consistent.  NOM is part of a new movement among conservatives.  They spew hate.  When they get a negative reaction, they act injured.  Victimized.  It’s pathetic.

So at least I have one bad guy in the mix.  I hate NOM.  Not for being bullies, not for perverting religion to their own hate, but for being all emo.  And I can give up my sympathy for Carrie Prejean because she signed on with them.  But still, digging up nude pictures from when she was seventeen?  Sure, it proves she isn’t absolutely morally pure, but that has never been the position the evangelicals take.  They all flirt with with sin, and if they get caught over the line, they repent.  It’s practically required.

I started out being mad at Perez Hilton.  That’s easy, because I’ve never liked him.  He can be funny, but mostly he’s cruel in a kind of “I can say whatever I want and then act harmless” way.  And, what kind of person tries to trip up beauty queens with complex moral questions?  That’s like Kramer beating up the third-grade Karate class.  But then I asked myself: Who picked him as a judge?  The same person who thought Roseanne Barr should sing the National Anthem?  What, exactly, did they expect?

I guess what I really hate is the politico-entertainment-industrial-complex.  It’s this machine that delivers something like Carrie Prejean through talk shows, commentators, entertainment shows, and the internet as if she can really be the focus of an important national debate.  These are the people who filled our living room with Joe the Plumber.  And the problem is, they guys on my side are as in on it, as guilty as the guys on the other side.  Bill O’Rielly, Keith Olberman, both eat this stuff up.  Each from his own moral high ground, but they both let a 21-year-old bimbo become the focus of their respective wrath/understanding.

But the real problem is that some powerful alien force can introduce robots.  This article explains how scientists model Condorcet’s theorem among animal communities. But they don’t just watch the animals, they create convincing robots which infiltrate the bug communities and convince them to do something self-destructive:

José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

Just imagine if some other power tried to do the same thing with us?  They could send robots into our world, disguised as humans, and convince us to make self-destructive choices, such as ignoring global warming, invading Iraq, and giving away our civil rights.  That would make a good story, wouldn’t it?

• Driving through a hail of bullets hoping the thin metal of your car will protect you.
• Finding conveniently placed explosive barrels to help cover your escape.
• Taking on a guy with a handgun using your super-duper fire extinguisher.
• Recognizing a voice you heard over an international line, based on two words.
• Shooting a middle-aged woman in the arm and saying “it’s just a flesh wound”.  Could be, could hit an artery.

But none of these things upset my friend.  He’s against the torture.  I went back and forth.  I’m also against torture, and also believe that it rarely gives reliable intelligence.  In fact, I don’t like the show, 24, in part because they constantly use torture to advance the plot in a way that seems to validate it as an intelligence gathering tool.

On the other hand, it’s just a movie.  We allow ourselves to enjoy movie protagonists who commit every kind of heinous act.  Torture doesn’t stand out over, say, murder, genocide, drug-dealing, or vampirism.  I thought people who got upset about the “torture quests” in WOTLK were idiots.  Still do.  So why shouldn’t this be the same?  I think that, had they really established the character they were shooting for, the father so blinded by rage and love for his daughter that he considers nothing else, it might have worked.  But in this case, Liam Neeson’s character never rises above a sort of everyman with talents.  So we don’t really separate his morals from our own.  So his choices are those of someone who we consider “moral”.

I do think my friend was being ridiculous, but I get just as ridiculous over other things, especially the off-screen hiding spot.  The hero walks into a room, looks around, and is suddenly jumped by a bad buy who was hiding off-camera.  It’s a good hiding place, because WE CAN’T SEE THEM.  The hero, though, shouldn’t be limited by the camera frame.  Liam Neeson does this once, walking out into a hall, apparently without noticing the bad guys, who then knock him out.  So they can hang him from a pipe.  This trope drives me crazy.  I haven’t walked out, yet, but then I’d have to explain and people would probably say “it’s just a movie.”

I did go down to Chinatown, made it as far as the security gates keeping people out of the parade route.  I took pictures, which are posted here.  I talked to vendors, and bought two Obama hats and a bottle of Obama hot sauce.  The hats will go to my sister, who wanted something that was there, at the inauguration.  The hats count.  Even though you could buy the same things from other places, on other days, she’s getting hats that have that ineffable been-there-ness.  Had I bought the same hats a day later, though, even though they might have been sitting there for the inauguration, they would not have that magic quality.

On 9/11, I was walking around Dupont Circle, talking to my sister on a cell-phone.  I assured her that nobody would attack Starbucks.  One plane hit the Pentagon, the other may have been coming for the Whitehouse or Congress.  I had friends who were closer, but that day was in the air everywhere.  We didn’t know what would happen next, there were rumors of car-bombs, and I didn’t dare get on the Metro.  So I was “there.”

In fact, if the security was the issue, the rules would change constantly.  Any static set of precautions can be planned around or bypassed.  But planning around rules that don’t stay the same is far more difficult.  But I suspect that even if we explained this to people over and over, most would still rather have predictable rules.  They would feel comforted.  Obviously, the true goal of the TSA is comforting our fears.

There are other rules, practices, rituals that make us feel safe.   Once we go through those security gates.  The assumption is that terrorist will only target us on the other side.  With hummus.  We take off our shoes, take out our laptops.  No pen-knives, no liquids.  And, it turns out, no hummus, no cottage cheese, no yogurt.  The TSA doesn’t seriously think you could design a bomb that looks like an unopened thing of hummus, does it?  Anybody who could do that could make a meatball sub into something even more dangerous.  And how did they decide what amount was too much?

It’s a safety ritual.  It has to do with making us feel safe and protected.  It’s a bit of theater, really.  When they took my hummus, the TSA guy looked deep into my eyes, with the trained softness of a hostage negotiator or grief counselor.  “I understand,” he said, “I’m a hummus eater too.”  I offered him mine.

Before 9/11, we had a false sense of security.  After 9/11 we had a false sense of danger.  It happened, so we believe it could happen again, anytime, anywhere.  In fact 9/11 took years of planning and organization.   But we need something to tell us that it’s okay to fly.  Ritual security measures are probably more effective than real security, which necessarily takes place out of our view.