May 2006

What's really happening to the U.S.-Mexican border? (Monday, 5/29/06)
Ioan Grillo reports from Mexico City that the big debate over illegal immigration in the United States is even affecting Mexican politics at the highest level.

Yesterday, we pointed to Andres Oppenheimer's suggestion for helping the tens of millions of Americans who will be retiring soon, while also helping to create jobs in Mexico, which should encourage large numbers of Mexicans to stay home or even go back home. However, we're aware that if millions of American retirees were living in Mexico, it might remind lots of people about how Texas became part of the U.S. rather than part of Mexico.

Actually, there were people in the American government during the 19th century who wanted to see the United States cover all of North America--e.g., Secretary of State Seward made the deal to buy Alaska from Russia--and some had specific plans for annexing Mexico, although such actions were seen by many at the time as a way of securing and extending slavery.

At any rate, will the border more-or-less separating the United States from Mexico largely dissolve over the years ahead? Of course, not so long ago, some political scientists and historians were predicting that English-speaking Canada would become part of the United States during the 21st century, and, at the moment, we seem to be further from that, rather than closer.

Meanwhile, Venezuela's President Chavez is using a lot of his country's oil money in an effort to promote the formation of socialist movements in Latin America, but with mixed success. Given the fact that Venezuela is one of the world's leading oil exporters, and given America's huge appetite for energy, it probably can be said that the U.S., in addition to financing both sides of the so-called "war on terror," is helping to finance Mr. Chavez's anti-American activities too. Kelly Hearn is in Buenos Aires and reports that a "backlash" appears to be forming in a number of regions.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Archive of European Integration (Friday, 5/26/06)
Does commerce lead to peace? Former British Prime Minister John Major has pointed out that, after centuries of wars between Britain and France, the idea of armed conflict between the two countries now seems inconceivable, if for no other reason than the enormous number of ongoing business relationships between the two countries.

Similarly, now that there is such vigorous daily commerce going on between individuals and companies on Taiwan and those on the Chinese mainland, war seems far less likely. If this is true, many in the United States have reason to celebrate, because the U.S. is still obligated by treaty to defend Taiwan. An invasion of the island from the People's Republic of China could lead to war between the largest country on Earth with the world's fastest-growing economy, on the one hand, and the richest, most militarily powerful country, at least in terms of conventional armaments, on the other.

European leaders have expressed frustration with many young Europeans who have known nothing but European peace and don't seem to understand what all the fuss is about, as European countries inch toward a "United States of Europe" level of integration. Considering that more than 60 years of peace has followed centuries of European wars, including the two most devastating wars in all human history, both occurring within the 20th century, many people who have been working so hard on the development of a viable European community feel they've been doing a pretty good job.

Economic relationships do seem have an importance that extends beyond economics itself. Here's the interesting and instructive Archive of European Integration site.

Distance is about to shrink to essentially nothing, functionally speaking (Thursday, 5/25/06)
The interacting knowledge and tech revolutions are causing the world and its global economy to "morph" into something very new. As we have suggested, this may even include the dissolving of nation-states as we have known them during recent history, as the social-cultural-political world reorganizes into something highly unfamiliar. If you think that the Internet has had something to do with these historic changes--and it has--how do you expect the world to be changed by the 800 Gbps of bandwidth that appear to be coming? Here's more about Internet2 from Barry Levine.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: National Institutes of Health: Office of Science Education (Sunday, 5/21/06)
Americans love hi-tech gadgets as much as any people in the world, but most don't have a clue as to how they work or what a knowledge of natural processes can mean, not only for understanding technology, but also most of life.

Contrary to common assumptions, "science" is defined, not in terms of its subject matter, and certainly not in terms of any conclusions at a particular time, but, instead, by its METHODS. Moreover, these methods apply to empirical questions of all types, whether we call the activity "science," historical research, journalism, court procedure, or something else.

In fact, "science" is just another name for the best available methods at a particular time for providing trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. If you develop or discover better methods, they don't become an alternative to science, but, instead, PART of science.

There's a lot more to science than what the National Institutes of Health deal with or, for that matter, what the Institutes present to the public through their excellent Office of Science Education.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Book TV (Wednesday, 5/17/06)
Many academics like to brag about how little television they watch, which may simply provide evidence, possibly redundant, that universities are not necessarily centers of rationality to the extent that they like to claim. Some of the same people seem to favor books over computers because words are printed on paper rather than appearing on electronic screens, even when they're the same words. The academic culture can be irrational, fraudulent, or corrupt in its own very special ways, and occasionally even a little humorous.

Newton Minnow famously remarked in 1961 in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that television was a "vast wasteland," but he seemed to be referring to commercial prime-time programming. He certainly hadn't had an opportunity to watch the Charlie Rose program or anything else on PBS at that point, because PBS started in the late 1960s, or, for that matter, any of C-SPAN's three television networks, because C-SPAN started in the late '70s. Nonetheless, many academics don't seem to have moved beyond 1961.

If Charlie Rose were to interview, say, the Secretary General of the United Nations on a campus, most of the school's professors probably would want to attend. However, when Rose interviews Kofi Annan on his program, many of the same academics will miss it because they "haven't watched television for years" and seem proud of it.

While PBS has changed American society, there's nothing else quite like C-SPAN either, and it comes from the commercial cable TV industry. Members of the academic culture who like to talk about the books they read but refuse to watch television will miss the three-hour sessions with major authors on C-SPAN's "In Depth" program, and they'll miss Book TV as well. Pity.

What does it take to learn about nature, including human nature? (Tuesday, 5/16/06)
The current Administration seems to contain quite a number of people, including its Chief, who don't appear to understand what it takes to answer questions about their world or themselves.

It isn't that President Bush is conspicuously lacking in intelligence, as many of his political enemies have claimed; in fact, he's probably smarter than most of the people who spend so much time talking about how "dumb" they think he is. However, much has been made, even by some Republicans, of his overall lack of curiosity or about how little he reads, and so on. His personal information base does not seem to be very impressive.

Mr. Bush has acknowledged that he underwent some sort of personal transformation when he was about forty years old, which he attributes, in part, to his wife Laura's influence as well as a to a fundamentalist religious conversion. He went from being an over-privileged, irresponsible, alcoholic young man who was at serious risk--See Doug Wead's book, All the Presidents' Children, a grim history of the sons of presidents--to a highly-disciplined middle-age man who seems driven by central values. However, again, his personal information base does not seem to be very impressive. Even though he will turn 60 this year, he continues to remind many professors of so many of their beginning college students.

However, while he really does appear to be a different kind of man now than when he was in college, there is no strong indication that he has attempted to catch up on what he missed at Yale where he seemed to spend so much of his time "hung-over" and disengaged.

He certainly isn't alone. In fact, in a representative democracy, the President does appear to represent millions of other Americans who also don't have a clue about what it takes to be right about anything. It isn't good enough simply to make up something or to accept traditional ideas which have their roots in a time when even the smartest humans on the planet didn't even know that the blood circulates or what the heart is for.

One of the most intriguing psychological issues has to do with how so many people can feel so strongly that they're right about things, even when they have so little to go on. It's not a mystery anymore, of course, particularly for persons who are acquainted with the past 70 years or so of research in experimental social psychology or cultural anthropology.

Informed individuals, at least, now know quite a lot about what it takes to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all types, as well as how most people TYPICALLY develop and maintain their attitudes and beliefs about their world and themselves. Current knowledge about these processes helps explain why there are more Lutherans in Minnesota than in India, for instance, or why there are "red states" and "blue states" in the first place.

Along these lines, a new investigative study concludes that the Administration, under great pressure to find a sufficient number of "bodies" to send into combat zones, seems to be ignoring mental health issues when dispatching military people to Iraq. One of the consequences seems to be a significant increase in suicides among American military personnel.

Presidents tend to surround themselves with like-minded people, and this administration seems to contain quite a number of people who really don't believe in psychiatric illness, or, for that matter, in most other natural processes as we can now best understand them. Here's more from Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor on the Hartford Courant's important investigative report.

Zeitgeist and women leaders (Saturday, 5/13/06)
The Washington Times' David Sands says that women seem to be playing a greater role in world affairs.

Are Americans ready for a woman President of the United States? Neither major American political party has pushed female candidates since the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984 won only one state. However, Mondale also announced on national television that he would raise taxes, something that candidates typically feel they cannot say, if they want to have any hope of winning elections.

Also, Ronald Reagan deftly defused the age issue during the second presidential debate that year by remarking that he wouldn't hold Mondale's age and inexperience against him. The remark got a big laugh from the audience, including Mondale, who later said that he knew at that moment that he and Ferraro had lost the election. So, the 1984 debacle can't necessarily be attributed to the fact that a woman was on the ticket.

Hillary Clinton certainly appears to be assuming that she will win reelection to the U.S. Senate this fall and will run for president in 2008. However, while most experts regard her as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at this point, her election certainly isn't assured, and her nomination doesn't appear to be a sure thing either.

A prime-time TV program about a female president started the season as a big hit, but its audience quickly faded to the point where it almost surely won't have a spot on the schedule next fall, and ABC has even been withholding the final episodes for this season, hoping to air them when they won't do damage to the network's "sweeps" chances. Still, it's possible that the program has been failing, not because it's about a woman president, but because it's just not a very high-quality program. Fans of NBC's "The West Wing" feel that there's been no comparison in terms of the quality of the scripts, the characters, or the casting.

So, is it time for a woman President of the United States? We don't know either. Stay tuned.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: What is Your Mom Worth? (Friday, 5/5/06)
Salary.com offers a "wizard" for calculating what your mother's in-home work is worth. They tell how they arrived at their conclusions that "stay-at-home moms" would earn $134,121 if paid at current market rates for each of the things they do. Of course, anyone who really is prepared to pay that much for the job surely would have no difficulty finding takers.

Moreover, if a mother who works inside the home is worth that much, think of what Michelangelo's famous fresco in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would be worth. On the other hand, who's going to buy it?

In a market economy, something is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, and that's the problem. In fact, the owner of the Sistine Chapel, the Roman Catholic Church, is often said to be fabulously wealthy because of the treasures it owns. On the other hand, there is no way the Church could turn many of these things into cash, even if it wanted to. Is St. Peter's Basilica really a fabulously valuable asset, or a priceless treasure that is very expensive to maintain?

Despite everything, the Catholic Church frequently has cash flow problems, in part, because most of the world's Catholics now are located in Latin America, which, on average, is poor, and most of the money that is collected to maintain the international Church comes from North America, where it has incurred tremendous costs and has suffered diminished contributions because of the recent wave of child molestation cases.

At any rate, we think it's silly to try to estimate what mothers are worth in the home. Instead, what they do is more like the Sistine Chapel. Their value exceeds any financial calculation. Mothers are priceless, so they certainly shouldn't be treated as if they were sweatshop labor.

Another economic advantage accorded American churches (Wednesday, 5/3/06)
Some early Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, concerned about the possibility that government and religion could become intertwined in the U.S. as it had been in Europe during the 18th century and before, believed in a strict separation of church and state, even though, in Europe as well as North America, "religion" was regarded as a synonym for "Christianity." Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, even Muslims, might as well have been located on Mars at that point.

However, not all Americans have agreed with the Sage of Monticello; in fact, some still long for some sort of theocracy on the North American continent, apparently inspired by how well that sort of thing worked in John Calvin's Geneva or in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. As has been the case with most of American legal and political life, the relation of government to religion has been a sometimes-contradictory mishmash born of political compromise.

Relationships are likely to become even more complicated during the years ahead, given America's increasing cultural diversity. Will some Americans of the future insist that Buddhist or Hindu aphorisms appear on U.S. currency, or will a Muslim President-Elect take the Oath of Office while holding his hand (probably not "her hand," given the nature of Islamic ideology) on the Koran?

President Bush doesn't appear to mind mixing his own version of Christianity with government. With his, er, well, faith in faith-based initiatives of various kinds, he probably has his own religion in mind, not necessarily those that don't even include a concept of "God" in their ideologies, even though an increasing number of Americans identify with most of the world's major religions as well as quite a few smaller and lesser-known ones.

Churches are exempt from paying taxes in the United States, but, as Mary Williams Walsh writes, it goes beyond that. Churches and affiliated organizations can opt out of the law that provides at least some degree of pension protection for employees of secular organizations. Instead, an increasing number of employees of church organizations are finding that they are being left high and dry during old age.

How many immigrants rallied yesterday and what were the effects? (Tuesday, 5/2/06)
It's hard to say in both cases. Gillian Flaccus reports from Los Angeles that "more than 1 million illegal immigrants" took to the streets across the country, leaving their jobs and schools, in order to demonstrate their economic importance to the United States. However, Doug Palmer reports that many economists seem to expect that the impact of the one-day strike and boycott on the U.S. economy is likely to be fairly small.

If the reported numbers are accurate, one might expect that meager effects might be the result of a fairly small percentage of those persons contributing to the American economy were participating in yesterday's street demonstrations.

But are any of the reported numbers accurate, and how can we know? The American press has been reporting various numbers of illegal immigrants in the United States--generally ranging from 10 to 12 million--but who's counted them? It appears that at least some of these numbers have come from the Pew Foundation's research, but it's difficult to say. With respect to answering most empirical questions, the majority of Americans seem to believe that it's good enough simply to make up something.

Were there really a million illegal immigrants in American streets yesterday? Who counted them? "More than a million?" Well, how many more, and how can we tell? A million persons plus one more person? Two million, three million? Also, it's frequently said that about 7 or 8 million illegal immigrants are employed in the United States. How could anyone possibly know that, given that, by definition, many are "off the books."

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, said on television that the Congress will try again to pass new immigrant-related legislation, but it may not be exactly what many of the demonstrators yesterday want.

What can be done about the flow of people from the south into the United States? How about a 700-mile wall to bring back memories of the "good old days" of the Berlin Wall? Of course, the latter was intended to keep people in, while a wall across the U.S.-Mexican border would be intended to keep people out. Nonetheless, policing it with personnel carrying machine guns might make it into as much a propaganda disaster for the United States as the old Berlin Wall was for the former Soviet Union.

Are there people entering the United States illegally now? Yes, but the ancestors of millions of Americans entered the United States perfectly legally, at least according to somebody's law, even though they were kidnapped in Africa and brought to North America against their will.

Similarly, what was once about half of Mexico is now part of the United States. Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the so-called "Mexican War" of the late 1840s, but, because his views were so unpopular, he chose not to run for reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives, and, instead, returned to Springfield, Illinois. Former General and President Ulysses S. Grant considered the War as a "land grab" and an effort by proponents to extend slavery.

In fact, some American politicians favored annexing all of Mexico, and, if McClellan had won the 1864 presidential election, it's fairly likely that the Confederate States of America would have moved quickly to do just that, and that slavery would have been legal throughout the greatly expanded Confederacy.

At any rate, when a large part of Mexico's territory became part of the United States, Mexican people came with it, and they certainly didn't enter the United States against the wishes of the American government.

While not much has been said about it in the press, is it possible that the highly permeable boundary which more-or-less separates the United States from Mexico is symbolic of a growing erosion of the concept of "nation state," which, historically, is not very old to begin with? Nearly everything is "morphing" into something that is greatly unfamiliar, and nobody really knows what to do about it.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: 100 most influential people (Tuesday, 5/2/06)
Here's Time magazine's idea of the 100 most influential people in today's world, which is no doubt dedicated to the proposition that lists help sell magazines and ads. The magazine's editors don't provide much insight into their views about the nature of the processes by which these people are actually causing things to happen in the world, as opposed to simply being present and well-known. The basic issue seems to be one usually dealt with in the first few pages of college textbooks in most of the social sciences; i.e., the distinction between correlation and causation and what it takes to tell the difference.

Will mining be made safer in the United States? (Monday, 5/1/06)
Randal McCloy says that some of the air masks failed following the Sago mine explosion in January. However, Tim Huber writes from Charleston, West Virginia for the Grand Forks Herald, saying that insufficient profit potential because of the small market hampers the production of the safety equipment that miners really need. However, like military personnel and their families, miners and their families seem to accept far more than their share of the costs and risks of producing energy that everybody needs. This seems to be one of those situations in which society as a whole should shoulder the burden of protecting miners, whether or not it is profitable for private-sector companies.

Incidentally, while China has coal mine disasters so frequently that it's really not even "news" anymore, there are other mine problems throughout the world, and not all of them relate to the production of energy. Two Tasmanian gold miners have been found alive but are still trapped. They have been provided with food and water, but, despite being able to talk to them, rescuers are still crossing their fingers as they work to free the miners.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Monticello Explorer (Monday, 5/1/06)
Was Thomas Jefferson America's prototypical Renaissance Man or its most outrageous dilettante who shaped his historical image by entertaining the right people lavishly while spending himself deeply into debt? At this point, it's now widely recognized that, rather than being the author of the Declaration of Independence when he was only thirty-three, it's probably more accurate to say that he was the author of the Declaration's first drafts. Others, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, had quite a lot to do with creating its final form.

In fact, while Jefferson has lost some stature among historians during recent years, Adams has gained, and it's at least interesting to ask the hypothetical question of whether there would be a Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C. or an Adams Memorial if it were being done today.

At any rate, there are at least two trees at Monticello that Jefferson himself planted, so visitors can still have a living physical connection to America's third president. Jefferson's greatly restored home is still a great place to visit, and curators there insist that he would likely recognize it and feel at home if he were to walk in now. In fact, if you are unable to visit in person, or even if you've been there multiple times, the Monticello Explorer is likely to be of great interest.

While perhaps not all that admirable in his personal life, Jefferson contributed greatly because of his ability to think very large thoughts, attributes he shares in common with contemporary political figures such as John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich. Both of America's major political parties like to trace themselves back to Thomas Jefferson.