Popes, Presidents and Lies

Right, so now we know. The pope—the new one, not the old one—has come out and said it, and the Vatican has not denied it; so that’s pretty high on the credibility scale. Now then, hold on to your seats, take a deep breath, and prepare for the unimaginable.

There is a gay lobby in the Vatican.

Also, of course, many many saints, said the pope. But yes, in addition to that gay lobby, there is a “stream of corruption.”

You remember the question of Ratzinger, the old pope, who retired last February and trotted off to Castel Gondolfo, to spend pleasant days and nights with his personal secretary, Padre Georg, a hunk who makes Clooney look like Archie Bunker. Here’s a sweet photo of them together:

Right, I’d be grinning too, if I had that guy that close to me. Well, the old pope is proposing to live the rest of his days in the Vatican; Padre Georg will be secretary during the day for the new pope, and then walk home where he will be secretary during the evenings for the old pope.

People in Italy found this situation unusual; as one reporter put it, the pope routinely enjoys robust health until the day he dies. For a man not known as a trailblazer, Ratzinger caused millions of jaws to drop the day he decided to retire.

The press then speculated—was there any reason that the pope decided to retire? Age and frail health are nothing new to the papacy—what had changed that had made it necessary for the pope to retire? Two things came up, two very old things: sex and money.

There was talk of a secret report written by three cardinals; the report, it was said, would be given to the new pope personally by the old pope. The Vatican press agent, of course, completely dismissed the idea of a “gay lobby,” essentially calling the idea absurd.

Well, chatting in Spanish to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious (CLAR), Francis dropped the news, and the press office, declaring the event private, had no comment.

I’m thinking a lot lately about secrecy and deception. The Vatican knew about a situation and lied; the head of our national security agency, James R. Clapper, looked a congressman straight in the eye and lied. And I am trying to remember—when was the last time I lied?

Well, I’m either a completely dishonest person—and thus incapable of seeing the terrible truth that I’m prevaricating at a prodigious rate—or I’m pretty honest. Barring social lies, I really can’t remember the last time I lied to anyone.

Cancel that—I pleaded a headache recently to get out of an engagement. But I did feel guilty about it. Which, perhaps, is more than Clapper feels; here’s his justification for lying to Senator Wyden:

 "I have great respect for Senator Wyden," Clapper said in an interview with NBC on Sunday. "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- 'When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife' kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."

This is an insult. A senator asked you a question, Clapper, and there was nothing of a trick or ruse about it. It was a simple, direct question that made you uncomfortable, and so you decided that it couldn’t be answered by a simple yes or no. But what did you do? You said, “no, Sir.” And then weaseled around by saying, “not wittingly.”

What’s worse is the White House’s response to the controversy. Here’s CBS News on the subject:

President Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given" Congress, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday, adding that Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press." 

Well, Clapper certainly was straight and direct. “No, Sir,” is both; unfortunately, it wasn’t true.

That said, no one really gets off the hook. Obama says that all the activities of the National Security Agency have been vetted both by congress and by federal judges. If true—and it hurts to write those words—then everybody knew, and it took a 29 year-old kid, now branded as a traitor, to tell the people the truth. But if true, why was Senator Wyden asking the question in the first place?

And tell me, how does it jeopardize national security by telling the public in general terms how we’re going about doing national intelligence?

The Obama administration is saying, as did the Bush administration, “trust us.” Unfortunately, neither administration has proved worthy—on this issue—of trust.

On Questions and Intelligence

Well, it’s a story with many levels. But first, let me point out—we’re spending enormous amounts of money for something that gives us nothing.

There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.

The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.

And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?

Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?

I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.

And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?

Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.

And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.

Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.

Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.

Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?

It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.

It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:

 Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy

Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?

Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”

It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.

And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….

1984 Is Not Behind Us

There’s something screwy about it. The United States government has collected this enormous amount of information about whom we’ve called, how long we’ve talked; it also has connections to the largest servers in the country, and so it knows—minimally—who we’ve emailed. And if the government has access to servers, it seems logical to me that it can also monitor Internet use.

We cannot have, says Obama, 100% safety and 100% security: there has to be a trade-off. And he says that these programs have thwarted terrorist attacks in the past. What he doesn’t say is what attacks, and how the information helped identify the threat.

And according to at least one guy, Shane Harris, this kind of data mining is really only useful when you have a specific lead. And where do those leads come from? Here’s Harris on the subject:

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists' laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it's exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

So we have an enormous pile of data, and yet we’re still relying on tips, interrogations, or information found on terrorists’ laptops. Why collect all this information? Couldn’t the government get a court order when needed?

It’s also a little screwy that the government, with all this data on its hands, was unable to prevent a couple Boston kids from making bombs, killing several people, maiming scores more, and shutting down a major American city for a day. The Russians had told the FBI—watch out for this guy. That said, why wasn’t the government looking at all Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Internet usage, which presumably is where he was “radicalized” and / or where he learned to make the bombs?

I also understand that the last thing Obama wants is to have a terrorist attack on his watch. And God knows, I would have continued the program, too—what president wouldn’t? But the real question is whether a president, with the help of Congress and the Supreme Court, should be making these decisions.

And let’s be honest, if given the power, the government will use it. But is it legal, collecting all this data? Well, here’s what James Sensenbrenner wrote in the Guardian last Saturday:

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

The point should also be made—how do you get the genie back in the bottle? We have invested billions to obtain the technology to spy on our citizens. Is it likely that the government will walk away and leave it rusting there?

We went nutso after September 11. But actually, our freedoms had been eroding for years before. Am I the only person in the US who thinks that being asked to pee into a plastic cup in order to get a job stocking cereal in Wal-Mart is an unjustified invasion of privacy? And why is it that I am photographed countless times a day, sometimes without my knowledge? Since when did walking out onto the street mean implied consent?

“If you’re not doing anything wrong,” goes the line. Yeah? What if a major al-Qaeda figure dials my phone number by mistake? What if he emails the wrong person? Or what if my vengeful ex-wife, working away for our homeland security, decides to tap into the system, read my emails, and then start stalking my girlfriend?

Even if I trust this president not to misuse the information, will I trust the next one? Oh, and by the way, what if I write the sentence, “It is completely untrue and without basis that I want to kill Obama?” Will that ring alarms bells for Homeland Security? Am I to expect a knock on the door shortly?

The guy who leaked the information is 29, and though making a pot of money, wasn’t particularly high up in the hierarchy. He’s intelligent and speaks well; I believe him when he says that his intention was to force the issue onto the national stage.

Guess what.

He has.

Warning: This site may give you ED

Well, who would have thought?

Young guys are giving up porn.

I know this because I’m watching TED talks, recently, and ran into one entitled The Great Porn Experiment. Rest assured, dear Readers, this elderly and respectable blogger has never EVER consumed a speck of smut, excepting those times when I pass Mr. Fernández at the computer.

It seems, however, that I am an exception, if the speaker, Gary Wilson is right. In fact, anyone studying the effect of porn on the brain has a little problem—there are virtually no guys out there who don’t watch it. So that’s a problem, where’s the control group.

It’s basic brain anatomy—a guy seeing a picture of a lusty babe, if that’s his persuasion, get a little jolt of dopamine. Now if the lusty babe is being her sultry self in dad’s Playboy magazine (found in the sock drawer or under the bed)—that little shot of dopamine goes away, after a bit. But what happens when that busty babe is on a computer screen?

Well, several things. In the first place, you can click faster than you can turn pages, and more important, if you put all the smut that’s on the Internet in a magazine under dad’s bed, well, he’d need either a ladder or more likely a helicopter to go to sleep every night.

So Wilson outlines the problem: a slight jolt of dopamine is a reward, it gives us a good feeling, and it makes us want to explore the world, one part of which is sex. But if you sit for hours at a time, as some guys do, and do nothing but consume one erotic image after another, what’s happening in your brain? You’re getting a positive feedback cycle of dopamine—the brain is craving more and more stimulation, trying to get back to the feeling of that first hit of dopamine. It can’t, of course—that’s the trap of addiction.

You enter something called arousal addiction, but other things are happening as well. You’re isolating yourself, you’re losing interest in other things, you start to feel depressed and anxious, and critically, you start losing interest in actual sex.

Two bad things happen—when you are with a real partner, you can’t get it up. And guess what? You’re 22.

So young guys have been getting erectile dysfunction, as well as getting medicated for depression, anxiety, and a host of other conditions. And unlike the erectile dysfunction in elderly guys, it’s not a plumbing problem, it’s an electrical problem—the brain is sending a weaker signal to the brain.

Then something really weird happens—you’re a straight guy, so why are you watching gay porn? ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me,’ you think, ‘am I gay?’

Relax, you’ve burned through your sexual preference, as it were, and now you’re searching farther and farther afield for stimulation.

So what are guys doing? They’re giving up porn, and waiting out the two to six months that it will take to rewire the brain. And as one guy said, that gives him time to study French, play the piano, exercise, etc. A porn addiction takes a LOT of time.

I live in Puerto Rico, which has a serious problem socially with arousal addiction. Car stereos are blaring, people are shouting, the landscape is littered with signs that seem to rush at you, screaming to be noticed. And everyone everywhere is beset with six things they have to do or want to do or are in fact just doing. I report this as absolute fact—I visit Manhattan and feel relaxed. Ah, a quieter, gentler time!

“Let me tell you about a place that is so dark the sky at night is ablaze with stars,” I would tell my students.

“Let me tell you about a place that is so silent, you turn off the refrigerator at night—it’s too loud,” I’d say.

“Let me tell you about sleeping alone in the forest, and hearing the rustle of something moving through the underbrush outside, and not knowing what it is,” I’d begin.

They looked at me blankly. Of all of the pleasures of the world, the one imaginable one for them was a moment free of…

…stimulation.          

Tropical Winds

Well, the opportunities down here in the tropics are blossoming like cherry trees.

While our northern friends may be worrying themselves about Syria, the IRS / PRISM / HSA affairs, climate change and the Iraq / Afghanistan debacles, we have other things on our mind.

First off—did the mucama / bedchamber maid kill Georgina Ortiz Ortiz? Well, she’s being tried in the murder of 17 August 2010, but nasty tongues are saying otherwise. The couple had stopped having marital intimacy, they communicated through others on the Internet, and Georgina had declared that she wanted to divorce herself from her husband. Worse, according to those savage tongues, Georgina was having an affair with her 48 year-old personal trainer.

People are interested in all this because, well, it’s interesting. Oh, and Georgina’s husband Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, whom the aforementioned evil tongues suspect of actually committing the crime, is a retired Supreme Court judge, now on the faculty of one of the best law schools on the island.

The police suspect the maid, who is in fact on trial this week. And it’s true—well, it’s supposed to be true—that she had told the security guard, as she passed him, “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” using the word perra. Unfortunately, Georgina has a little dog, and yes, it’s female. So who knows what she meant?

Oh, and the security guard certainly has a shifting memory. The murder took place at three in the afternoon, and the security guard testified yesterday that the judge was absent and came back at around 5PM. The problem? On the day of the murder, the security guard said the judge came home at 3PM.

Then there’s more confusion—a neighbor who was first on the scene (well, second, after the killer) states that the scene was altered: one of the knives had been moved, the hilt cleaned, and the knife placed in the right hand. The neighbor testified that the judge was muy mal and kept asking why his wife had wanted to kill herself.

OK—and the mucama? Well, she’s a Dominican by the name of Aida de los Santos; early reports mention that she’s undocumented, later reports don’t. But it’s significant that she’s Dominican because, yes, there is some prejudice against Dominicans. And her story turns a bit bizarre—a story in First Hour / Primera Hora reveals that while in custody in the Witness and Victims shelter, she either tried to hang herself, or someone slipped a rope around her neck and pulled it tight. De los Santos’ family says it was a murder attempt, the shelter says it was suicide. De los Santos, at any rate, woke up in a hospital bed the next day after guards at the shelter used their cellular phone to call the ambulance; the phones at the shelter weren’t working that night.

There is some evidence against de los Santos. Her granddaughter testified that de los Santos had given her three bracelets, worth $1,400, with the initials “G” and “C,” presumably standing for Georgina and Carlos. The granddaughter was to go find someone to remove the monograms, and then sell the bracelets, to finance a trip back to a new life in the Dominican Republic. There are rumors as well about a bloodstained fingerprint on the hilt of the knife—if it is de los Santos’ print, it would be hard evidence against her.

Then there is the age of the ex-judge: he was 88 at the time of the murder. Could a man of that age kill a woman strong enough to have a personal trainer? If he were in a rage, and if he surprised the victim, could he do it?

Stay tuned, readers. More later, as we say down here.

Then there’s the interesting news that the AMA, of Mass Transit Authority, has been a bit relaxed about checking the driver’s licenses of the bus drivers, 12 of whom have been found to be without valid licenses. So that means that 12 buses are idled, which is major anguish, since it can take up to an hour to catch a bus, which may well pass you by, if the bus is full or the driver thinks it’s full (there’s always room at the back) or if, for some reason, he is simply disinclined to stop.

“So why don’t they hire temporary drivers?” I said to my friend Tony.

“They’re broke,” he said, “They’re five or fifty million (can’t remember which) in the red.”

So I had to tell Tony the reason—half of the time, riders ride for free! Eight years ago, when the Urban Train started, all of the buses got refitted with new meters that would read the little cards that the train reads. And the train, in private hands, has been duly maintaining the readers. The Mass Transit Authority, on the other hand, a government agency….

“Well, now you can tell them,” I said, after he commented that the new head of the AMA can’t figure out why the train’s ridership is up and the AMA’s ridership is consistently sinking, essentially at the rate the meters break down.

“Or we could wait until the last meter breaks and ridership is at 0 and all the buses are totally crowded and the director is completely nuts,” he said.

We agreed, his was the better idea.

Oh, and did I mention that according to The New Day, our local paper, if we get downgraded by Moody’s and the like 100,000 jobs will be lost, investors will lose 4.6 billion dollars, our sales tax will hit 18.5%, and the economy will shrink by 5%?

Oh, and we have until June 25 to do something about it.

The governor is proposing, in this dire situation, lowering the sales tax. What’s the scoop, you ask? Well, the governor proposes taxing business to business; here’s how it works. At the moment, the government doesn’t charge a tax on Sony when it sells televisions to Wal-Mart; under the governor’s plan, it would. Now those good people at Wal-Mart could suck it up and absorb the bite, or they could turn around and sock it to the customer.

Well, in this situation, you’d expect urgent meeting, crisis management, guys in suits looking worried-but-calm going into and out of marble-walled capitol offices, right?

What—are you crazy?

The governor and most of the legislature are busy this weekend.

What are they doing?

You really wanna know?

Not sure…YES, tell me!

Attending the Puerto Rico Day Parade in New York City!

The Dead Finger Strikes Again

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her—death.

How do I know the precise time? Because I looked down at the YouTube clip that I chose, or that had been chosen, as the vessel for my grief. The oboe had just finished its solo in the second movement of the New World Symphony.

Is it hokey, this music? I’m never sure, but it hits me, every time. And I needed to be hit, because I had just gotten the news: the Acres might be sold.

If you know the story, feel free to skip the next paragraphs. My father and mother, whom I called Jack and Franny, bought twenty acres of forest in Southwest Wisconsin, and decided in the 1960’s to erect—with their own hands—a small wooden house.

“I needed a place to live and die, so Jack built me a house,” was my mother’s matter-of-fact comment on that decision.

Well, Jack was certainly the Master Builder, with a reverential nod to another Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. That applied in the States; when Jack and Franny sailed their 27-foot Norwegian fishing boat through Europe, the captain then became Jack the Skipper.

But every story, especially in this family, has many sides. I was conscripted during the winter to sand floorboards from lumber scavenged from a decommissioned Air Force base. That summer we poured the foundation and put in the floor. During the following winter, I sanded the boards for the ceiling.

What emerged was a lovely house that absolutely everybody loved to come visit but no one in their right mind would want to buy. People, it seems, like house with bedrooms, if you can imagine such a thing. They define pulling out a bed from an uncomfortable sofa—which is what Jack did—or sleeping in a bunk in front of the picture window—which is what Franny did—as camping.

It was completely idiosyncratic, as unconventional as they were. The spice rack lived up at the ceiling, unless pulled down by a rope and a pulley. There were only two closets; the bathroom was small and became miniscule when Franny added the apartment.

My parents had a genius for friendships—the house saw many wonderful dinners, parties. Jack would be standing in the kitchen, aquavit in hand, beaming out at whomever it was who had come. He was about to start the Chinese cooking; all the ingredients were at hand, neatly chopped or sliced or measured out in little containers. It was an hour of preparation, five minutes of cooking, and a leisurely 40 minutes of the best Chinese food I expect to have in my life.

For forty years my mother lived in the house, and she chose to die there as well. Right—so we did that, emptied out the house after she died, closed the door and went away.

I have, in fact, made a small profession of saying good-bye to the place. I did it first three days after she died, that gorgeous May of 2010. I did it a year later, when we were going to put the house on the market, and needed to “showcase” it for the realtor.

Well, we either did a lousy job of it, or the above peculiarities of the house were off-putting—nobody wanted to buy it. So when the Morning Glories—those wonderful women who had cared for my mother in her last year—decided, with the Zanas, to hold a party at the house, I decided to go up to Wisconsin, and say goodbye, yet again.

It was not an easy trip; the weather was cold and rainy, the house seemed sad and unkempt, there were many ghosts.

Perhaps literally.

Bess and Tibor came out, bringing us food, wine, and excellent company. The talk turned metaphysical, and Bess related how she always associated her mother with deer. She was talking with her sister at the time, and then she rose, went to the window, peered and saw…

…not a single deer.

No, she saw fourteen.

“Yes, but have you tried that in Manhatt…”

That’s when the smoke detector went off.

Nobody was smoking; nobody was cooking. I took the damn thing—still shrieking—outside, where there was a strong wind.

Wouldn’t stop….

I was almost fearful, taking the battery out, that it would still keep going.

It didn’t, of course. Two days later, we had the party; I played the saddest and yet most regenerative music I knew. We bid our hosts good night, and began doing the wrap-up.

“Interesting night,” said Eric. “Wonder what Franny would have thought of it?”

The porch light went out.

“You ever put that battery in the smoke detector?” I asked Eric.

“Nah, and we’re not gonna.”

Seemed sensible.

And so the house has sat empty, or rather full of the memories, the love, the occasional spats, the tears and the kisses and mostly—how I miss it—the laughter of those forty years of life and death and grief and joy. And now someone—perhaps—has been chosen to live in it, and fill it up with their own life.

I know grief, as Franny did. You let it out, you wail, you feel better until you need to do it again. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

“But where will they live when they come back,” I sobbed.

Felt real as I sobbed it.

Right, get to work. Sat down in my chair, put on my earphones, clicked the arrow to start the Dvorak, howled for 3:49 minutes. Then I started the post:

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her— death.

Then the computer went dead. No cursor. I could see everything, but there was no cursor, and the computer wouldn’t respond to keyboard commands or typing.

I did the only thing I could do—a forced shut down. As I did that, my iPad, which was charging through the computer, flicked on. I noted the time.

11:23

My mother was born on 11 /23 /1920.

A Corporation No Mother Could Love

"Our work in wheat is focused on helping improve wheat productivity, including breeding, biotechnology and improved agronomic practices," said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles in a statement.

This sentence says it all, but no, not in the way Monsanto would like. Notice the curious expression, “helping improve wheat productivity.”

First question—helping whom? The wheat? The farmer? The greater good?

Second question—at what is wheat being productive? I sort of know what I do, which is get up, write some stuff, teach a few classes, and hope vainly (and formerly secretly) one day to go viral. But what does wheat do?

The questions go on and on. I knew, though I prefer not to think too much about the matter, that cattle breed—but wheat? And if wheat does breed, do cattle then pollinate? And what’s the deal with the “biotechnology and improved agronomic practices?”

Spokesmen are supposed to speak, which implies communication, but this is a classic example of a sentence that says absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s utter gibberish—which would be OK, if it were spoken. We had a president recently who spent eight years falling into one sentence and then scrambling to get out the other end. It was agonizing to watch, although it also could be amusing. Once, during one of the debates, I was present in a large room of University of Wisconsin students as Bush tried to come to the end of a sentence. He paused, trying to find some light in the dimness of his brain, and the group collectively held its breath. Then a whispered question from somewhere in the room: “is he stoned?”

But the “in a statement” up there at the end of the first paragraph makes me believe that this is not spoken, but a press release. And that’s standard—would you want to be Lee Quarles and have to explain face to face what a genetically modified wheat plant was doing in an Oregon field a decade after your company had stopped testing it?

So the question is, is it intentional gibberish or unintentional? My first instinct was unintentional—the corporate mindset had so settled in Quarles’s psyche that he was first, incapable of logical thought, and second, completely convinced that wheat could breed, use technology, or improve agronomic practices.

Now, I think it was intentional. And I think he must be chortling, up there in Missouri. It’s fun, you know, to practice this bit of mercurial foolishness with the language. I do it frequently, and for the same reasons as Quarles.

Raf (peering inside the refrigerator): Who drank the beer?

Marc (practicing for his mayoral bid): First of all, I’d like to thank you for that question, and to say that it’s citizens like you: ordinary men and women, people who get up in the morning and put on their clothes and feed the kids and go to work, you ordinary, good, decent men and women who form the background of our community—it’s people like you, unafraid to ask the hard questions….

Raf (flatly): You drank the beer.

Marc (unstoppable): I’m calling today for an independent, bipartisan commission…

Raf (walks away in disgust)

Repeat that twice a week for thirty years and you have a fair sampling of my marital life. And I am sure that Quarles can do it better than I, since I focus most of my time on writing short and lucid, as opposed to long and opaque. Quarles, on the other hand, spends fifty or sixty hours a week doing just the opposite.

And I hope they pay him well, because he’s gonna be a busy little bee, as things heat up. A Kansas wheat farmer, wonderfully by the name of Barnes, has filed suit against Monsanto, and so we get the following statement.

"Tractor-chasing lawyers have prematurely filed suit without any evidence of fault and in advance of the crop's harvest," said David Snively, Monsanto executive vice president and general counsel.

Right, it might be Snively—and is Dickens making up these names?—who “said” it, but it has Quarles all over it. Notice the nice shift: it’s not the good farmer, standing in his field. No, no—Monsanto is smarter than that! Can you imagine a photo of Barnes standing alone in his field, mopping his brow, squinting into the camera, standing against the wheat field that rolls endlessly and perhaps genetically modifiedly into the distance? And then a picture of the home office of Monsanto? Nope, let’s not go after the farmers, who are anyway Monsanto’s customers / pawns. So Quarles gets Snively to say it’s the lawyers—who rank a bit lower than farmers on the lovability quotient—and then he gets a spark of genius!  

I see Quarles in his office—a large windowless affair—sitting before his computer, wondering how to give this sentence a spin. “Tractor-chasing,” whispers the muse, who then goes off to smoke a cigarette. Quarles grins—she’s never let him down yet.

And Quarles may also have to deal with this, one day:

An amendment inserted into the 2013 Farm Bill passed by the House of Representatives' Agriculture Committee Wednesday would revoke the ability of individual states' lawmakers to pass GMO-labeling laws, food advocates warn.

What does this mean? Well, suppose a liberal, agricultural state like Vermont decides to pass a law requiring that all food sold in the state have a label, saying This product contains genetically modified food products. Would you buy it? Of course not, why should you?

And Monsanto knows that. So we’re going to have a federal law that says that states have no right to require that food is labeled as GMO, or (presumably) even GMO-free.

Now then, did Monsanto actually come out and say, “hey look, we don’t want you to know what’s in the potato salad?” Nope, they got an Iowa representative, Steve King and shame on you, to tweak it as the PICA—Protect Interstate Commerce Act. This isn’t about labeling, this is about interstate commerce, see?

One wonders—was it Quarles who dreamed up the name? Perhaps so, because one critic of the act, Heather White, noted a stylistic similarity:

"This impenetrable language simply means that states would be prevented from regulating just about any agricultural product in commerce," White wrote, adding that, "This sweeping provision would severely undermine all states’ authority to set standards for environmental protection, food safety or animal welfare. It would apply to genetically engineered food labeling, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) regulation, antibiotics use in meat and other local and state food and farm regulations."

It’s one thing to drink all the beer—that’s inadvisable but forgivable. But to modify all the food, threaten a billion dollar wheat market (Japan and Korea have just announced they’re not buying American wheat), and then turn around and sneak a bill into a farm act that would prevent anyone from knowing what they’re putting in their mouths, or —God forbid—their children’s mouths?

Unforgivable.

Big Tobacco, Step Aside

Warning, first off. If you watch the video below, you’ll be in for two minutes of vitriol that, despite all you know of emotional hijacking, will leave you shaking with rage.

Now then, here’s how it started. I wrote a post about guns recently, in which I stated that some gun owners are amping up the rhetoric to fairly high levels. So much so that a college professor wrote an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette; here’s the quote I used:

In a bizarre op-ed in The Charleston Gazette last week, journalism professor Christopher Swindell argued that the National Rifle Association “advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.”

I went on to say that the new president of the NRA, Jim Porter, had called Obama a “fake president,” though I didn’t say, as did Swindell, that the NRA had called for an armed rebellion. I did say that the one motivating emotion associated with the gun owners I had spoken with was fear.

A reader reacted in disbelief through Facebook—was I serious? And that set me thinking—what is it about guns? Having a talk about abortion is tea party conversation next to the typical discourse on gun control.

So I got curious—what happens when you shoot a gun? Do you get a rush? What goes on neurologically? Well, the last gun I shot was a BB gun, so I turned to somebody with more recent, and authentic, experience.

Yo, Eric, step into the blog!

“Depends on the caliber,” said Eric, after I had posed the question. He then went on to give me the advice about preparing / preventing kickback. Then he wanted to know, “what are you thinking of shooting?”

Well, we went on to have an interesting conversation. He thought it was possible, suspected dopamine was at play, and mentioned video games and gambling machines.

Bang on, Eric!

In the wake of recent tragic events, there have been a raft of articles about new reasons for gun-control and the psychological make-up of mass murderers (See NYT or WSJ), but the authors of this piece (co-authored with neuroscientist James Olds) believe there’s a critical component missing from this discussion: the very addictive nature of firearms.

That’s Steven Kotler, writing in Forbes Magazine. And let me say this up front: the following is conjecture, a theory.

But Kotler and Olds also believe that dopamine might have a role, and they too adduce the large amount of research on first-person shooting video games, which leads to increased levels of dopamine. (Tangentially, by blocking the reuptake—just what the SSRI antidepressants do.) And what does dopamine do? In the brain, it’s an upper, a motivator. We feel pleasure, excited, and eager to explore the world. Oh, and what drug floods the brain with dopamine? Cocaine, the most addictive of all.

The problem? The first hit of dopamine is always the best. So the brain seeks higher and higher of whatever the addiction is—cigarettes, booze, cocaine, shopping—to get that initial high.

Second, well, let the authors explain:

Two things make this even more alarming. First, because the human brain evolved in an era of immediacy—when threats and rewards were of the lions, tigers and food variety—the dopamine circuitry has an inborn timing mechanism. If the reward follows the stimulus by roughly 100-200 milliseconds, it’s sitting in dopamine’s sweet spot. Firing a muzzle loader—for example—would certainly release dopamine, but it takes too long between multiple firings for a significant reward loop to be created. Firing an automatic weapon, though, sits close to the sweet spot—an assault weapon can fire a round every 100 milliseconds. Meaning not only are guns addictive, but automatic weaponry is far more addictive than most.

Well, as I said, all of this is conjecture. What about anecdotal evidence? I googled “gun addiction,” and came across thefiringline.com, which bills itself “the leading online forum for firearm enthusiasts.” Here’s a sample:

Is there a 12-point program for gun addiction?? I retired two years ago and firearms and shooting has become my major hobby and obsession!! In the past 24 months I have purchased on average one gun a month. Now I have traded some that I already had but my purchases seem to be growing exponentially. I enjoy buying a new gun as much as shooting them.

I can't pass a gun shop without checking it out. I go to Cabelas and Bass Pro every week to see if they have anything new. Whenever my wife and I travel the first thing I do is check out the local gun shops. I go to every gun show within a 200 mile radius and that's at least one a month. I spend probably 2 hours a day online searching auctions and forums.

My wish list grows daily. Now, I have sufficient discretionary income to support this addiction but if things continue at the current rate that could be at risk.

Please tell me that I'm not alone and this behavior is perfectly normal. Is there such a thing as firearms obsessive- compulsive disorder and how do you treat it???

Best answer? Get a wife with a shoe addiction, and you’ll never have a problem.

Lastly, I turned to another source, Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone. Here’s what he has to say:

For the moment, that strategy is paying handsome dividends. Handgun sales have jumped 70 percent since 2008, racking up an estimated $1.5 billion in sales last year. Powerful pistols – sold under brands like Beretta, Glock and Ruger – have replaced traditional hunting guns as the industry's cash cow. Revenue from assault rifles is growing at an even faster clip – having doubled in the past five years, to $489 million. Gaudy profit margins have become the norm: Top gun makers enjoy gross profits of 30 percent or more. Ammunition manufacturers, too, boast of being fat and happy. And it's no wonder: AR-15 enthusiasts brag they can fire up to 400 rounds in 60 seconds. Paying roughly 50 cents a bullet, such shooters are blowing through $200 worth of ammo in a hot minute.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gun-industrys-deadly-addiction-20130228#ixzz2VM6g4vPV

Well, if it’s true that assault rifles fire at a rate that’s within dopamine’s “sweet spot,” then it’s no wonder that they’re selling so well. And if a little addiction isn’t enough, how about this?

For a younger generation raised on graphic video games, shooting at paper targets or "plinking" bottles and tin cans doesn't carry much appeal. So the industry has come up with some new ways to make shooting more like playtime. A firm called Zombie Industries manufactures life-size mannequins for target practice. Some models "bleed" fluorescent goo when shot. Others respond to gunfire in a more lifelike fashion, opening up gaping chest wounds and "bursting into little pieces of blood-soaked zombie matter when you shoot them." The manufacturer offers a wide line of "zombie" targets, including "the Terrorist" – an undead bin Laden – and, more troubling, a blood-soaked, buxom woman-target called "The Ex."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gun-industrys-deadly-addiction-20130228page=2#ixzz2VM8EYnQP

I rest my case.