Syzygeist

9/11 Threat? Looking back, not ahead!

Despite the attention being paid to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the past may well be beside the point. What is in front of us is much more important than what is behind us. 

The Twin-Towers attack, notwithstanding its individual tragedy and economic and political impacts, both domestic and international, distracted us from the future that we wish to create and put us at risk of not being able to create it. "It" is, broadly speaking, a better world than we found when we got here - inside and outside our borders.

Nations, like communities and families, must decide how to allocate resources to sustain the present and build for the future. Getting the enemy to mis-allocate resources to a fatal degree is an old and clever strategy. Many in the military and elsewhere believe we caused the Soviet Communist system to collapse by forcing them to overspend on defense when they could least afford it. 

Al Qaeda has effectively done that to the US. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, we overreacted at a time when we could not afford to devote so many resources outside our own domestic challenges. (Defense spending under Bush jumped from 3.6 to 6 percent of GDP). We launched a war into Iraq on a false pretext. Homeland security exploded. And Obama has held to that overall trajectory, upping the ante in Afghanistan against the informed counsel of his own Vice President. (And we continue to fire drone missiles into countries against whom we have not declared war, killing innocents along the way.)

According to the National Priorities Project, the United States has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of that, homeland security spending alone has cost $635.9 billion. Funding for homeland security has risen from $16 billion in FY2001 to $71.6 billion requested for FY2012. Defense spending for 2012, much of it predicated on the terrorist threat, is projected to reach $703 billion, or roughly 5% percent of current projected Gross Domestic Product. That's also a little more than half of the $1.3 trillion deficit.

If even one trillion seems unfathomable, that's because it is. How big is one trillion? Maybe this will help:

If you had started spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars (CNN reports). Actually, you would have spent roughly the equivalent amount the US plans to spend on defense this coming year. A mathematician puts it like this: "1 million seconds is about 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years."

So $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security in one decade represents an allocation of capital that is unprecedented in human history (the entire US economy in one year is worth about $12 trillion).

Could the US afford $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security over the last decade? It would appear not, on the face of it.

It's not that nothing should have been spent, but the focus outward on the terrorist threat that might arrive here has managed to ignore the inward needs of the US, which are beginning to play out now with greater force. 

Thomas Friedman recently noted the convergence of four negative conditions in the world today: power arrangements radically changing in the Middle East; Europe struggling to save its financial house; China teetering for reasons of its own; and the US in a political stalemate as its currency weakens, its economy grows less competitive and its fiscal order resembles that of an early developing country.

Presently the President and Congress are fiddling, unable to agree on spending or cuts or taxes - the CBO currently estimates a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2011, the third largest in 65 years - or priorities that should guide our actions for a stronger future. 

The US simply has to get its act together if it is to serve as a linchpin of healthy democracy, an engine of growth and a purveyor of freedom in the world. Freedom in this case would mean an environment where individuals are free to pursue and to realize their dreams. And that would mean we are investing wisely and well in our future, not squandering resources out of fear, imprisoned by the force of memories better left behind.

Is This the Way the World Ends?

The purported end of the world came and went last Saturday, and to the surprise of few, "the Rapture" did not come to pass.

The world is not, however, out of the woods if you read Peter Nolan's superb Crossroads - the End of Wild Capitalism and the Future of Humanity. Nolan's thesis is that unrestrained capitalism, its extremes and its contradictions have put China, the US and the world of Islam on a collision course that gives the world "the choice of no choice." Either these three models of culture and capitalism will find constructive engagement or the world as we know it is in extreme peril - either from economic instability and social reaction, military conflict or environmental destruction, or all of the above.

Students of economics and geopolitics will find much that is familiar here in theory but Nolan's formulation of the world's current dynamics, risks to the system and limited options going forward - engage cooperatively or unhinge the world - are elegantly reasoned and argued. As holder of the Sinyi Chair at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Nolan demonstrates great knowledge of and passion for China and its potential to find a harmonious route through capitalism's contradictions, although success here is by no means a given. He also argues convincingly that global capitalism requires global regulation in order not to run amok and roughshod over most of the world's population. 

In this part of his thesis is the intriguing notion that the major oligopolistic global corporations have an insurmountable advantage in the world and are increasingly stateless in their ambitions and interests. Developing economy companies are starting from so far back in some areas that they cannot hope to compete. And then, what?

Readers will also find fascinating economic and political history to suggest that the underlying approaches to capitalism pursued by China, the US and the Islamic world are far more importantly similar than they are different. Property rights, individual pursuit of profits, taxation and a drive to serve the common good all have a place in these systems (and Islam has found a way to embrace interest on capital by another name.) Their differences with regard to capitalism are more perceived and exacerbated by nationalisms and cultural bias than substantive.  But can these systems find ways to constructively coexist before it's too late?

Nolan reaches back as far as Biblical times to report the early histories of China, the Middle East, Europe and the infant United States, which has risen in the post WWII period to dominate the global system (and now spends $2 billion a day on military expenditures!). Moreover, the US, motivated by its thirst for oil, has alienated Islam with its unquestioning support of Israel and tends to view China as a rising threat rather than a potential and natural collaborator in meeting the challenges of global modernization. China's labor advantages will continue to depress advanced economy wages, and we shall have to deal with that.

In the last 30 years, progress has been made on many fronts. Millions have been lifted out of poverty as finance and technology have spread into the developing world. But wealth disparity has grown significantly (Egypt, by no means alone, is one example where one percent of the population controls nearly all the country's wealth); the environment has been severely degraded (decertification growing by great leaps in China, whose organic water pollutants equal those of American, India, Russia and Japan combined); and, global warming has emerged as man's unique threat to the world in which we live. In this the US has been slowest to recognize the threat, let alone take significant steps to address it, Nolan notes. 

The US has fomented an unregulated form of global finance capitalism that led to the great unwinding of 2008, which has not yet played out. This is one factor, along with US dependence on autos and oil, military power and a jaundiced view of the Middle east, that leads Nolan to conclude - quoting former US defense Secretary Robert McNamara, that there has never been a more dangerous moment in human history.

This book is riddled with fascinating facts and also broad arguments to challenge any conventional American view about the legitimacy of our approach to global finance capitalism and to others who may challenge us or require a different political approach on the world's playing field. You may finish reading this book as I did, convinced that if the US is not prepared to change some of our political and economic approaches to China and Islam, we may bring Judgment Day upon the world sooner than we think and in ways not yet imagined. That said, Nolan will help persuade you that nuclear Armageddon, as one way to end the world, is by no means out of the question.

Hillary's Larger Right To Be Seen

Hillary Clinton disappeared from one of the most historic scenes in recent American history and most people would not know it happened. (Perhaps more sadly, many might not care.) Please consider:

Editors of the Hasidic weekly Der Tzitung photoshopped the US Secretary of State and another woman out of the scene in which Mrs. Clinton, seated near President Obama, was watching the progress of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

This was quickly noticed and reported - the vanishment of the U.S. Secretary of State, even virtually, being something to note.  Der Tzitung's editors issued an apology and explanation. They meant no disrespect to Mrs. Clinton or the President, they said, but images of women in their publication are expressly forbidden - to "protect their modesty."

Well now, White House policy expressly forbids the alteration of any official news photo, so the "modesty defense" would appear to fall short here. The editors did not need to run the photo at all - that would have defended Mrs. Clinton's modesty, if indeed it was threatened. 

But to alter the photo and thereby to change the face of history is not fairly an issue of modesty. It is a not-so-subtle repression of women, in another garb. It also has that Orwellian 1984 feel of Newspeak, in which the photos of the news really aren't.

We can all look back to when women were not permitted to vote. Or to garner a fair share of property or wealth gained during marriage. Or to serve in combat military units. Laws have been passed, legal actions brought. Still women fight for equal rights and equal pay for equal work. Arguably they are further ahead in the United States than in much of the rest of the world.

One might argue that this is a tempest in a teapot and we have better things to do than to worry about the photographic exclusion of women - even as important as Hillary Clinton - in sectarian weeklies that few see and perhaps more could care less about. 

I would contend, however, that this is gender discrimination dressed up as something else. Keeping images of women in the news out of the news implies that women don't make or matter to the news. And that is simply wrong. And I would add that if you address the little things, the big things may begin to take care of themselves. (This was the apparent lesson of subway cleanup efforts in New York City, well described in Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point," wherein the battle against graffiti and turnstile-jumping began a trend toward a much cleaner and safer underground.)

Maybe the White House feels it has enough on its hands these days not to react to an item like this. Maybe Hillary doesn't mind, and maybe the orthodox Jewish vote matters more. I would hope the White House enforcement arm for accuracy in media (do they have one?) would react to this in some official way, to say hey, you;re not allowed to do that, and we would like a retraction in the form of the accurate photograph published in the same place of prominence as the doctored one.

Oh, and by the way - there are better ways to respect and protect women's modesty than by distorting their accurate role in history.

In Dead Bin Laden's Wake

I do not rejoice in anyone's death but I am glad Bin Laden has met his maker and grateful to those servicemen and women who put themselves in harm's way to carry out our country's military plans. In the case of Al Qaida, a non-state terrorist organization willing to target mostly civilians, a war played outside the rules has provoked responses that have been outside the rules as well. 

Victory may be sweet, but we need to be vigilant that provocation does not cause us to abandon the American principles of law and individual rights that we hold dear. That said, I find my mind filled with questions:

If we went into Afghanistan to pursue Osama and deal Al Qaida a death-blow, is our reason for being there now satisfied (having satisfied it in Pakistan)? That debate has been going on for nearly the last decade, and the NY Times reports that it has surfaced again at the highest levels.

How could the Pakistani authorities not have known of Bin Laden's compound, and its inhabitants? (This question was raised Monday on National Public Radio's Fresh Air interview with Lawrence Wright, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road of 9/11)  Pakistan has some explaining to do, as do US officials who manage the relationship and provide military and financial aid.

Is it true of a networked terrorist organization that if we cut off the head, the body will die? History has its share of revolutionary and proto-revolutionary movements that have been effectively crushed by government force. Surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment and the execution of key leaders tend to be effective, but these have tended to be within national boundaries. Both the former Soviet Union and China provide illustrations here, but they are not alone. (Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the US Black Panther Party of the 1960s-70s "the greatest threat" to internal security and used all the FBI's resources to harass and disrupt them, including the alleged use of assassination.) Chris Hedges, who covered Al Qaida for the NY Times, would suggest this is not one of those cases.

What potentially helpful terrorist-fighting information was found on computer hard drives confiscated from Bin Laden's compound, (and is there any chance it might make it onto Wikileaks)?

What role did Google Earth play in identifying the compound for what it was - a refuge not just for someone important and clandestine but for the Most Wanted Man of The Century? Global surveillance of this kind would seem to be a game-changer all its own. Finding the compound on Google Earth certainly happened quickly just after the news broke.

Does Bin Laden's death make terrorist acts against the US more likely? (If we believed that, would it make us wish Obama had acted otherwise in ordering the strike?)  

Some reports have suggested a connection between information gleaned at Guantanamo and identifying the compound as Bin Laden's. Are we to believe that torture (water-boarding or otherwise) played a role here? If we wanted a justification for torture, maybe some would consider this enough. (I favor observing the Geneva Convention.)

Some of these questions may be answered soon enough. I would like to say that I am confident of our government's account of events in general, but I am not. (Iraq and WMD come to mind). Events surrounding Bin Laden's death, however, will be subjected to as much scrutiny as any events in recent history, if not in all recorded history. The same technology and transparency that enables pervasive government surveillance, also enables relentless citizen inquiry, and I think the important truths here will become known if they are not already. 

As satisfying as Bin Laden's death may be in some respects, I am still hungry for more answers.

Don't Think POM, If You Can't

Go watch "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," by Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought you "Supersize Me" 
and who has evidently figured out how to supersize himself. This smart, tongue-in-cheek, manipulative movie about manipulation via product placement and brand campaigning will send you out of the theater wondering. At least it did me.
Spurlock's is not the self-aggrandizing approach one gleans from fellow documentarian Michael Moore, whose movies seem really to be about Michael-the-Main-Character in the end.
True, Spurlock has built his own brand as a spoofer-satirist-commercial-social critic by leaps and bounds, but he has done it in a way that hearkens back to newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick, who said every piece of persuasion should follow the same form: "Let me take you by the hand and show you a place I know, which for seeing will change you forever." This will.
Spurlock sets out to reveal the world of product placement and brand-building that takes place as a subtext of movie-making, where things appear on the screen not for dramatic intention or even because they belong there, but because a sponsor bought the right to put them there - or even, perhaps, forced them onto a director. This applies to drinks, cereals, cars, clothes, shoes... Major movies, we are told, cannot be made without this revenue stream, about which you as a consumer are told next to nothing.
About the only product not mentioned or shown here were weapons, and I found myself wondering what Winchester and Glock et. al. have to do with shoot--em-up action or war movies where machine guns are required. Spurlock did not go there.
But if you ever wonder why you think about some of the things - I mean, things - that you think about, this movie will give you some new or reinforced ideas. It worked on me like a charm as Spurlock worked his way to a prime sponsor - POM (as in, pomegranate juice) - who ponied up a cool $1 million to be the banner sponsor - for which there is in exchange enough POM consumed onscreen in odd moments to cure your urinary tract of any weaknesses, as we learn it allegedly has the power to do.
If you listen carefully to Spurlock at a key pitch moment before the POM CEO and her underlings, you would believe that this miracle juice can heat up male ardor, if you know what I mean. In an hilarious boardroom scene, Spurlock shows his rendering of an ad for the juice that is too graphic for the company's female founder, but it does evince a knowing smile.
Spurlock ends up using text the company wants him to use, and wonders if he has sold out, or is doomed to be a sellout as he gathers commercial support with Sheetz and Austin Mini to name two. No, one ad executive assures him, he is not "selling out," he is "buying in."
Along the way you learn that Sao Paolo, Brazil has wiped out all outdoor advertising to great aesthetic effect. In the US, sponsors and advertisers now spend slightly north of $450 billion a year to shower and surround us with images of all kinds, of which 75 percent is controlled through four major agencies. If you ever wondered if there is really a "them" organizing our cultural perceptions, you will come away with a sense that yes, they are, and now you know mostly who they are.
The movie also brings along a few academic experts to assert the fallacy of persuading people that their lives can be made richer and better by products, and also by an advocate who wants all subliminal advertising of this kind made transparent via screen popups. You have to see this happening, which you will, to get a feeling for what it would mean and to decide if you think this would be a good thing. I think it might.
I came out of the theater and headed for the men's room, as people of my age tend to do after a couple of hours, and followed a tall, slow-moving gentleman accompanied by two body guards. Soon we were all four lined up at the men's urinals. I found myself wondering about the various potential effects of pomegranate juice, real and perceived, on four guys like us, and wondering if they were also wondering, since we were all clearly over 50 (and the tallest among us was considerably older.)
As we left and exited the building, the two bodyguards ushered the tall gentleman into a waiting black car. I recognized former New York Mayor Ed Koch. Did he feel as a matter of public policy that something needs to be done about this world of image-making and cultural influence Spurlock showed is being somewhat deviously thrust upon us, mostly without our knowing?
I did not get a chance to ask before the black car sped away. But because POM was so on my mind - I thought I might pick up a few bottles to see what I think and see what it does (31 grams of sugar per bottle, about 7-8 teaspoons worth!) - it occurred to me that Spurlock had made his point. For that $1 million, POM had been penetratingly insinuated into my thoughts - and I am sure the former Mayor of New York got it too.

What Barry Bonds Shrank From (The Truth?)

A trip this past weekend for a book-signing party in San Francisco, city of my post-youth growing up,
brought a flood of associations and memories and in this case a brush with the famous and the infamous.

The party included a predictably amusing encounter with one Lance Williams, the gifted investigative journalist (and co-author with Mark Fainaru-Wada of Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroid Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports) with whom I worked as an editor when the San Francisco Examiner was still a viable afternoon paper owned by the Hearst Corporation.

Lance broke the early stories about Bonds and steroid use. Bonds was just convicted last week of obstruction of justice while being acquitted of perjury. So the jury concluded Barry did not lie to the Grand Jury about whether he knew he was taking steroids. 

This I found fascinating and a bit disillusioning. You mean after all this, the court process cannot establish that Bonds was taking steroids and he knew it and he lied about it?

Lance could only look at me and grin as I suggested a line of questioning that I thought Bonds should have faced.

Prosecutor: Mr. Bonds, when did you notice that your testicles were shrinking?

Bonds: (Unintelligible)

Prosecutor: Had you ever experienced shrunken testicles, or had reason to think that shrinking testicles were normal for an athlete of your age and ability?

Bonds: Uh, could you repeat that question?

Prosecutor: Let me put it this way. As you became more readily angered by small things, as your head and other parts of you grew larger while other, arguably important parts of you grew smaller, did you wonder why? Did you wonder about those injections that Gary Anderson gave you?

Bonds: Uh, I never really thought about it.

Prosecutor: Let the record show that Mr. Bonds is now apparently telling the truth.

Bonds: (Grunt.)

Prosecutor: Am I right in thinking you did not want to take the stand in your own defense because you felt you might incriminate yourself?

Bonds: Yes, I think so.

Prosecutor: So be it. 

Of course, that is how it was. Bonds declined to take the stand in his own defense. We are left with a great(?) athlete thoroughly besmirched. His records and reputation are in tatters, and a jury was unable to conclude without a shadow of doubt that he knew he was being injected with steroids - despite the visible changes in his body and personality, to which Kimberly Bell, a former intimate testified. (For derision Youtube-style, see also this.) 

The jury had to decide whether Bell was telling the truth or doctoring the facts to hurt a former lover from whom she'd unhappily split. Jurors also had to conclude whether Greg Anderson, who has gone to jail rather than testify, really injected Bonds with steroids as Anderson apparently was overheard to say on a locker-room tape made in 2003.

One might ask: who cares, in the end? Barry Bonds has been punished, betrayed by his deal with the Devil. Whoever once thought him a miracle hitter now knows otherwise, and he can take his place with Jose Canseco and Jason Giambi and others who juiced to improve their performance, got caught at it and either confessed or lied or kept quiet.

As someone with a 12-year-old son who plays a good game of baseball and dreams about being in the Big Leagues some day, I would have liked all the Bondsian facts to come out in open testimony, so that young players know what is really at stake here. A larger head (Bonds needed an increased hat size from 2002 to 2003, the clubhouse manager testified) is one thing, but smaller testicles and waning sexual ability are something else (this is perhaps a male view) and as warnings go, I prefer this one to be clear and well known.  

I am not suggesting that injecting Human Growth Hormone (HGH) would somehow be okay if procreative equipment were not compromised. It's a question of which bodily effect is more likely to scare young players away from their own potential performance-drug experiments in a highly pressurized and competitive society.

So Lance and I had a bit of a laugh - ironic and bittersweet though it felt - about questions that were never asked and never answered because, some might feel, they did not need to be. That is, unless you believe Bonds committed perjury before the Grand Jury, as accused, and should have been convicted of it, given the evidence against him.

Was justice achieved here? Maybe so. Whatever is left of Bonds - the man and the reputation, greater or smaller -  is the man he will live with, with full knowledge all his own. 

Does he still have a shot at Baseball's Hall of Fame? Does anyone care?

"From Crowhurst to Madoff to - Us?"

In the extraordinary book, "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst," a pair of journalists reconstruct the mysterious end to a lone sailor's life at sea. It would appear that Crowhurst, facing terrible embarrassment and shame at having faked a journey around the world, stepped off into the deep to become one with His Maker, at least as he understood Him at the time.

Crowhurst was among the few sailors to join the world's first single-handed round-the-world "Golden Globe" race in 1968, and he mounted it on a multi-hull, which had never been attempted. To say that he was in over his head is to make a bad joke at the expense of someone trapped by ambition, financial pressure, the British penchant for extreme adventure and trying to prove something that perhaps is not worth proving. (It has been said that nothing is more important to the British than to getting through life without being embarrassed.)

 

Crowhurst came to mind as I read Bernard Madoff's recently published confessions to The Financial Times and New York Magazine. What began for Madoff as a temporary solution to investor demands became a permanent problem from which he could not escape. As he got deeper in, he found he could not get out because the numbers would never add up - the Achilles heel of any Ponzi scheme, where yesterday’s investors are paid by those induced to put money in today. Mounting liabilities outstripped his capacity to deliver adequate returns, putting him on a slippery slope to self-destruction.

Crowhurst created a similar dilemma for himself in sneaking ashore in Brazil to make repairs, unbeknownst to the world, and effectively disqualifying himself from the competition. But he kept it secret and lay in the Southern Ocean making prodigious mathematical calculations to convince the world he was still racing. He had embarked on the race to prove his business worth as an inventor and signed contracts that he was ill prepared to meet. 

When the fleet came around the bottom of the globe and headed home, Crowhurst joined them. But he soon realized that his fraud would be revealed and would be ruinous. Despite having a wife and children waiting for him, he apparently stepped overboard rather than to face the music. (His story is also brilliantly documented in the independent film "Deep Water.")

Sadly for Madoff, his elder son Mark could not abide his father's fraud and its tortuous aftermath and hung himself on the anniversary of his father's confession. Madoff now faces life in prison, where he may contemplate the destruction of his own family.

Madoff's rationalizations for his behavior present a strange mix of blaming the victims and fingering the investment world for its greed and intellectual dishonesty - greed in seeking outsized gains, however they may be generated, and dishonesty in pretending returns like Madoff's could be legitimately produced year after year.  We now know that many professional investors smelled a rat in Madoff and for some time had refused to entrust funds to him. Other sophisticated investors/institutions - Carl Shapiro, Jeffry Picower, JP Morgan and HSBC, to name a few - poured money in. The SEC had ample reason to see a problem, since Madoff was reported to be involved in a Ponzi scheme of some kind, but the SEC brass either did not see it or chose not to intervene. That no one from the SEC went to jail for appalling failure in oversight is reason to wonder what kind of "financial regulatory reform" will actually work on Wall Street.

Both Crowhurst and Madoff faced inevitable music because Crowhurst's trimaran Teignmouth Electron had to come to shore eventually and Madoff had to deliver billions in returns even as the market collapsed. Something had to give and lives would be sacrificed in the balance. 

With such inevitable reckoning in mind, one has to wonder if the mounting debt crises in Europe and the US - which Madoff calls "a government Ponzi scheme" - is soon to sink its share of ships. Portugal, Ireland and Spain cannot be bailed out indefinitely without the bills coming due, as interest payments outstrip their ability to earn their way out. And the US leadership's current answer to our fiscal problem is to raise the debt ceiling - again.

We have seen the enemy, and it is - us?

Less Fat With Our Movies, Please

If you are a casual or regular movie goer, at least in New York City, you have perhaps experienced the routine "super-sizing" of snacks that goes on there. At a recent movie I requested a "small" soda and was told I could get a discount on an additional food product if I purchased a medium or large. (Why was that, I wondered? Oh, soda is cheap at wholesale, very profitable to sell, and other snacks are even more profitable.)
I found myself at a jammed food island at a Brooklyn cinema (a major chain that can go nameless) with people around me who might have been cast as The Hulk and who were avidly gathering tubs of popcorn and kegs of soda to accompany their movie viewing. I could not help but notice these were people who contribute to the obesity statistics in the US that make us perhaps the fattest country in the world, with all the health issues that attend on overweight.

No, I said, I wanted a small - and was then confronted with a tub of soda that would have filled a Toyota fuel tank. This is "small?" But I didn't actually want a side order of diabetes with my movie, since I happen to know a single can of soda contains at least 10 teaspoons of sugar. (An "average" US consumer was eating about 100 plus pounds of sugar a year a decade ago, up 28% since 1983 - probably without knowing it. And sugar crowds out more nutritious alternatives from anyone's daily diet, according to The Center for Science in the Public Interest. Have you ever seen broccoli offered in a movie theater?)
I bring this topic to the attention of anyone willing to fling himself into the public policy debate here.
The US Food and Drug Administration has just announced a set of rules to require caloric disclosure in restaurant chains and other major eateries. The restaurant industry wanted this federal law to avoid a patchwork of conflicting local rules. The proposed law would exempt movie theaters because, as the movie industry explained in its lobbying effort, movies are "escapist entertainment" where people do not go principally to eat.
Oh, really? 
It happens that New York City is a locale where movie theaters are required to disclose caloric content, although this seems not to deter the people I saw from stuffing their maws with sugar and butter-laden treats of all sizes. Whether this yummy food contributed to their escapist experience I cannot say, but I am inclined to think that it did. Maybe watching the movie helped the fact of getting unhealthier escape their notice.
But I lose my point here. If caloric disclosure is considered a good idea for public health and is being applied to help guide people to healthier behavior in restaurants, why should the government exclude movie theaters chains, where eating junk is apparently half the fun? It's safe to say that if an industry can sell a 10-cent bucket of sugar water for $4, it may not want the public interest to interfere. 

It's more sensible to ask whether disclosure really deters those who want to escape in all ways, and the answer might be mostly no. (The Ace study (www.acestudy.org) suggests that overweight people have in startlingly large proportion been molested or otherwise damaged as children, but that is another story. Other research suggests that the most effective remedy for major obesity is starvation, no "normal" food whatsoever, but with vitamin supplements along the way. That's another story too.)
Warnings on cigarettes have contributed to anti-smoking awareness, so soda-guzzlers and buttered popcorn packers might well benefit from the news that applies. We might also start by educating more children on the simple premise that you are what you eat, and that applies in movie theaters as well.

Only When Men Stand Up Against Men

MAVAW, an acronym to suggest Men Against Violence Against Women, came to me in one of those half-awake flashes in the middle of the night that make you feel you are onto something big. I had been troubled by the news of Eddy Coello, the former Bronx police officer indicted for murder in the disappearance of his wife and mother of their 5-year-old daughter. 

Men must stand up against men in this, I thought. Otherwise it will never change. And by the way, if guilty and convicted, this former cop should be sentenced to death - in my opinion. 

MAVAW needs to be created, I thought in my moment of midnight clarity, and mobilized to stand up for capital punishment in this arena. Perhaps where emotions run so amok - police are never more at risk than when intervening in domestic disputes - the certainty and finality of capital punishment might accomplish what law and reason cannot. (Do I want to pay taxes to keep Eddy Coello in prison for the rest of his life? No. But I would happily contribute to his daughter's therapy.)

According to reports, the woman had told friends that if anything happened to her, Coello should be the prime suspect, as he had reportedly abused her in the past. He had resigned from the police force after four years amid domestic violence charges involving another wife. There was at least one order of protection against Coello from 2007, and his current (now dead) wife had been seeking to separate from him and had prepared another restraining order against him.

The dynamics of abuse are complex and often involve victims who for various reasons cannot get away from the source of their suffering. How and why this situation persisted to its fatal outcome is something for friends and family of the woman - and her violent husband - to contemplate. It is tragic to consider how the five-year-old daughter will absorb and find ways to live with this horrifying family event. And it remains society's problem.

I happened to be raised by a father who would not tolerate any physical violence toward the one girl in the family, my sister. This rule was strictly enforced against our older brother and me. God help us if we were caught punching, slapping, biting, pinching or doing anything to her of that kind. (My brother once did throw a small stone over a lilac hedge and hit her in the forehead and paid her a dime to keep quiet, the only incident of its kind I was ever aware of.) 

It was completely hands off and the message was, real men don't ever abuse women in any way. (In the emotional and psychological realm, my father did not always follow that rule himself, but that is another story.) Women never got hit in our house.

Of course my nocturnal insight was not ahead of reality. MAVAW exists already as an official auxiliary organization of Hubbard House, one of the leading Domestic Violence Shelters in the state of Florida. If you search it online, it and related sites give you statistics and political issues to consider:

- A woman is abused every nine seconds in the United States - imagine how many times it has happened since you began reading this.

- In February, federal lawmakers revealed they do not agree on the severity of this problem or how to approach it. President Obama's budget in fiscal 2012 would increase efforts to stop violence against women and to help victims. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a Continuing Resolution for 2011 that would cut funding for health and safety net programs to help to victims of violence.

Through MAVAW online, I found the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence has a program that refurbishes and sells donated cellphones to underwrite their efforts. 

Two of my old phones are on their way - the least I could do in the wake of Mrs. Coello. I also put myself on MAVAW'S mailing list and resolved to speak up more.

Meanwhile, I will note that jailhouse criminals generally hate former cops and additionally have contempt for men who hurt women. So Coello is in a pickle. At least I am glad that he is not comforted, and a justice worthy of his violence may await him behind bars.

Students, Conscience, and US Policy

In perusing old notes for a new book, I came upon observations made in an interview with Robert Oxnam, former President of the Asia Society. Oxnam was describing what to him was the need for a true ideology for China, one that could reach beyond "to be rich is glorious" to give the emerging world power a moral and political identity to be proud of, and one that might hold it together more than break it apart.
The real message of Tianenmen Square, Oxnam said, was that students demonstrating for openness, tolerance, and democracy were exercising their right to be students, and to be the conscience of the nation. (My emphasis added).
The phrase stopped me. Where, I wondered, are US students today acting as "the conscience of the nation?" Or did this fade after Vietnam, or go underground after the draft expired?
President Obama, without conferring with Congress, has just put the nation into a third war front in Libya. This is part of a multi-national effort apparently entered into hastily, and without a broad US Mideast military policy to address fomented rebellions there.  This Presidential act, one could argue, overreaches the power of the presidency despite alleged authority to fight terrorism on any front for almost any reason. Obama went on TV to the nation March 28 to explain his rationale for US involvement.
I personally support efforts to block Qaddafi's intent to kill his own citizens (whom he may define as 'terrorists,' if it suits him), in the same way I favor intervening if the man upstairs is beating his wife. Boundaries are not the issue, and time is of the essence. I favor intervention when morally and practically required - but not without Congressional due process, and that does not have to take a lot of time. (In the case of the man upstairs, there is no due process and he does not deserve a warning.)
On another front, we learn this week that Obama no longer believes that suspected terrorists should get the Miranda warning afforded them constitutionally, depending on the circumstances and the perceptions of the FBI agent at the time.
An FBI internal memo revealed this week advises its agents:

1. If applicable, agents should ask any and all questions that are reasonably prompted by an immediate concern for the safety of the public or the arresting agents without advising the arrestee of his Miranda rights.
2. After all applicable public safety questions have been exhausted, agents should advise the arrestee of his Miranda rights and seek a waiver of those rights before any further interrogation occurs, absent exceptional circumstances described below.
3. There may be exceptional cases in which, although all relevant public safety questions have been asked, agents nonetheless conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat, and that the government's interest in obtaining this intelligence outweighs the disadvantages of proceeding with unwarned interrogation.

I find it hard to believe that someone who has conspired to commit acts of terrorism will talk if he has not been apprised of his Miranda rights but will clam up once informed that he can be represented by an attorney under US law. Really?
If the students I have in mind were to act conscientiously, they would object to the abuse of presidential power, or even the appearance of it, whether or not it is taking the US into war. They would also object to the selective application of Constitutional rights for "terrorists" because it would occur to them that anyone can be considered a terrorist, and treated accordingly. Surely the farmers in the American Revolution were terrorists in the eyes of the British, who probably had no trouble burning the soles of their feet to coax their plans out of them. That was long before the Geneva Convention or the evolution of US Constitutional law that made us a model for the world.
I would like to see our students defending that.