הם באו למלחמה

"הם באו למלחמה,"

"They came for war."

Ten Israeli soldiers were killed today in the waters off the Gaza strip, not twenty four hours ago, and already the world has disgraced their memory.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, I'll give a bit of background here. A flotilla of aid workers and Palestinian supporters was sailing to Gaza to deliver aid to the Palestinians and to protest Israel's occupation of the Gaza strip. As the flotilla continued toward Israel, its defense forces made it clear that the protesters would be treated as enemies of the state and arrested if they attempted to land. That attempt was made today, and as per their warning, the Israeli Defense Force boarded the flotilla, at which point the protesters beat the Israeli soldiers with steel clubs, stabbed at them with knives and allegedly fired at them with their own weapons and weapons taken from the Israeli soldiers. The Israelis opened fire on the protesters; killing nine and wounding an unconfirmed twenty protesters. In the violence, however, ten IDF soldiers were killed; their memories and deaths over shadowed by the death of the protesters; their actions being condemned by French president Sarkozy as a "disproportionate use of force," and by the US, when, merely speaking of the protesters "regret[s] the loss of life and injuries sustained in this incident." In addition the UN Security Council is in discussions to determine if sanctions on Israel are appropriate and Turkey has recalled its diplomatic envoy to Israel.

I have one question for you today. At what point is such force "proportionate," President Sarkozy? And to the US Deputy Press Secretary, if those were our soldiers following orders and defending our nation's sovereignty, would you merely "regret the loss of life?" This is no Tienanmen Square, this is no Kent State. These soldiers were following order and they were right in doing so. When they came under attack from people who purport to be "peaceful," they defended themselves. And the world condemns them, throws dirt on their graves, and tells their families that they were monsters. Well, world, they have more they have more courage, more strength of conviction and more gravitas than you, and they should be remembered more respectfully. Memorial Day can extend beyond our own borders.

On a different note, I want to ask another question. What would the US do if a flotilla of Al Qaeda supporters landed in Norfolk, or Baltimore, or Miami with aid for domestic terror cells who intend to destroy our country? What would we do if Mexican immigrants were launching rockets over the border in Arizona, or Texas? I submit that not the protesters, but that our own citizens would be the violent mob in such a case. When we are threatened our nation is incredibly indignant and it would take our citizens every ounce of self restraint we possess to keep from hanging our assailants from the side of the Golden Gate bridge.

Friends, ten Israeli soldiers were killed today, don't disgrace them or their memory.

My Life... In Cadence

Routine is something on which most of use rely. We awake at the same time every day, eat the same thing for breakfast, and, most days, go to the same job or classes that we did the previous day. I've been thinking for awhile that routine is a thing to be avoided, that it slows the mind and dulls the wit. After all, we could complete the same routine everyday in a mildly comatose state and no one would be ever the wiser, as long as we show up on time and complete our work satisfactorily.

In this recent lack of forced routine, however, I've realized that without a routine, we become entirely unproductive. Our mind resembles a rubber ball on a trampoline; never landing in the same place twice. If we let our mind have total autonomy it will bounce from idea to idea, never settling on one to run it through its course.

Do not mistake me for saying that we need to suffocate our lives in a tedious routine, simply for productivity. The mind needs a balance of routine and spontaneity, preferably daily. Because for extended times, routine will deaden the mind and dull the wit. And we should relish the time we spend outside our routine, because this is the time during which we can live out the thoughts and desires which distract us daily.

But neither should we wear our routine with such disdain that we cannot enjoy a single moment of it. It is our routine that drives our life, that allows us to enjoy those glorious laissez faire moments of abandon. Our routine is also the engine that drives us to accomplish things, drives us to act on purpose, and drives us to succeed.

The truth is that when our routine is lost for any great period of time we lose ourselves in it, lose creativity, and succumb to simple minded entertainment. So take your routine, enjoy it, relish it, do not scorn it, because it is the thing that is helping you succeed.

The Greener Grass

So it's been awhile since I've sat down at this keyboard and written some of my thoughts down here. The keyboard in front of me has changed as has the world around me, and I can only but hope that the eyes with which I look upon the world around me have not changed in sequence.

But the very fact that I haven't sat down to share my thoughts is intriguing and a bit disturbing in itself. Rarely in my life have I had such an abundance of time and rarely in my life have I had such little will to capitalize on it. Now make no mistake I have not abandoned my life of discipline for a life of slovenliness; my tasks still get accomplished on time, but my will to exceed those has vanished in these days and weeks of this intellectual repose. Shortly I will be returning to training and to education and I would consider it a grave loss of time if I did not express myself at least once.

It is a curious thought, however, that we humans, given the opportunity to capitalize on time, will often choose to abandon our desires. This is a testament to how truly faint of heart we all are. We can spend countless hours pursuing a person or an ideal and when the moment of truth comes and we have our desire within our grasp we back out; we choose the status quo. We convince ourselves that a change wouldn't be worth it, or that we were mistaken; that there's something better for us waiting down life's road, and we plod on.

So one questions this; "Are we simply meant to plod on?" Is the purpose of our life to delude ourselves into seeing some mirage in front of us, and racing to it, only to see a bigger one further off in the distance? I think this is what the American ideal has become. We're in search of just a little more, and we never stop to enjoy what we have. The grass may be greener on the other side, but the fact remains that by the time we get there we'll need more of it simply to survive.

The truth is that in all areas of our life we have safety nets; our own little pouch full of grass, so to speak. And this safety net is meant to catch us, it's why we built it. If we keep moving forward we just have to keep building bigger and bigger safety nets. And in the end, what's the point of it all, we work our whole life to retire in the worst health of our life, not to die, but to simply fade away.

Why can't we use the safety net from time to time? Test its weight. Didn't we built it for that? So jump. See what happens. I won't tell you what to do; I don't need to. You know exactly where the net is, exactly where the jump is, and exactly where you backed away. Jump. If you make it, look at all you've gained, and if you fall, well... enjoy the way down, because you can feel more passion on the way down than the whole world could feel in a lifetime of plodding on to the next mirage. I don't want to be called faint of heart, do you?

C'est la vie, c'est la vie

As I sit watching

So this will be my first attempt at writing during my academic endeavor, for lack of a better word. And so I sit here on the so called "Dean's Patio," as though a dean would sit here in the midst of the sweltering heat and incorrigible lack of correct grammar. I have just finished my first lecture in a class titled "Western Civilization," in which my professor asserted that history cannot repeat itself identically in the future and obviously we can agree that this is true, as time is a linear progression. He also asserted however that there are trends in history, things that are not necessarily identical to the past, but are certainly similar. This we can also agree on without debate, but a question arises from this ascertation, and that question is from where do these trends come?

This is the same question posed by my professor to the class with the obvious answer to follow; human ignorance. So human ignorance is the reason why humanity continues to pursue the same tragic goals and fall into the same vindictive traps as all of humanity has in the past. We need to be more educated about the past so we can change the future.

Plausible enough, right? At least until one considers that as we approach the year 2010, the base of human knowledge will be doubling every 72 hours; quite an impressive function. So it would follow that the number of these trends would be diminishing as the base of our knowledge increases but this seems not to be the case. The same nations are fighting the same wars, and the same people are shouting the same things, only in different places, under different flags.

So is ignorance truly the cause of the world's ills? Or at least, should I say, the ills in the world which we as humanity are cursed to repeat. Is there another solution? Is there another condition; another pretense to humanity, which, if realized and altered, could avoid these pointless charades for our future audience of one? I do not sit here with the answers, I just sit here with the questions in hopes that someone else has the answers.

Bourgeoisie Taste

I haven't been writing much lately, it seems as though the banal triviality of summer life outside the academic forum stunts my creative talents, although the availability of free time would seem to make opposite true. This may very well be my last chance to write before I return to such forums, whose impositions on my schedule may make such intellectual escapades such as these inconvenient, but time will show us both whether or not this is true.

I have, however, in my grand availability of time, given much thought to many things, and as an aficionado of all things cognitive, I feel an obligation to express myself at least once. I have recalled, in my pondering, a conversation I had with a friend of mine several months ago, almost a year actually, with the national election soon to follow. He is a bartender, recently married for the second time, with a newborn baby and a child from his previous marriage. We were discussing the health care crisis and the proposed solutions, one of which has entered the national stage very recently as our President tries to a nationalized health care program available to the general public. At the time of the conversation this was not such an important and vocalized controversy, but nonetheless I stated that making a national plan available to the public strongly resembled and in fact, provided an incentive for socialized medicine, and by such, provided incentive for socialism in general. My friend responded something surprising and altogether appalling, "Perhaps America needs a bit of socialism right now."

Now, I have no intention of insulting my friend with the title bourgeois, but that is what he, and most other bartenders, newlyweds and new parents are nationwide, and if this is the opinion of the middle class collectively, America and the entire West collectively has lost some of the basic and vital tenants of what make America America. We are, as a nation, and as a hemisphere, the sole opponent of the great evil that is socialism. We fought it in Korea, we fought it in Vietnam, and we fought it to our own detriment in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan during the 1980s. We did not always succeed, but neither did they, we did not advance on them, but they could not advance on us. We succeeded in halting the spread of an addictive and destructive theory that could have stagnated the world. Socialism, for the last fifty years, has been our nation's nemesis, and we emerged from the quagmire of the Cold War victorious.

Today, however, our country stands itself divided on whether to accept a small portion of this theory which we have stood so resolutely to defeat. If our own middle class is not behind their leaders to stand more firm then ever, and if our leaders are not steadfast in their devotion to American ideals, we may very soon see others standing firm and steadfast against us. America was once the source of innovation and education, the harbinger of freedom and justice, and the protector of the weak and the oppressed. Now, in our own inner turmoil, we have failed to turn to that source of innovation and that reserve of world class education. We have succumbed to the same laziness to which our enemies have succumbed before us, and we have failed our very own futures by turning to the past for answers to our questions.

The curse of the middle class has been before that it is too rich to get help from the rich but too poor to have all of its needs met. This is untrue. The true curse of the middle class too educated to be apathetic, but not educated enough to make decisions. If the middle class wants America to have "a little bit of socialism," then the middle class is only going to grow, because they are by far the largest demographic in the electorate. And if the middle class continues to grow the disparity between the well educated and the under educated will continue to grow until those educated in mediocrity will be making the decisions for us all, as is shown by the recent elections. The curse of the middle class is not poverty, it is not disparity in taxation, and it is not unfair representation. The curse of the middle class is under education, and until this is remedied the fate of the country may well be in the hands of those who have no business holding it.

Altruism and Human Behavior

I had been asked recently by a close friend of mine to explore the possibilities of altruism and its reality in everyday life. Granted, it would have been much simpler for me to respond to his question in a conversation, but sometimes, and I have found in the past, writing to oneself offers the mind a different sort of efficiency in communication. One can better express oneself alone than in the company of many people, mostly because the pressure to make oneself heard immediately is lifted. So it becomes easier and more beneficial for both of us that I express my opinions here.

The important part of the paragraph above is the sentence easier and beneficial, because these two words will guide the rest of this essay. Millions of dollars are spent on psychologists and arcane "seers" and clairvoyants in the attempt of determining either the behavior of oneself or the behavior of others. Human behavior can really be defined in the most simple of economic terms, and that is utility. Humans respond to stimuli and make decisions based on relative utility and the opportunity cost of each decision. In layman terms, people make decisions based on ease and benefit. Every decision is a balance between cost and reward, ease and benefit. Par example, one desires a comfortable midsized sedan but at the same time it is vital that one replace the AC unit in one's house, so the settlement becomes a Toyota Corolla instead of a Toyota Camry; a balance between cost and utility.

It is useful then, to touch on the idea of altruism here. Altruism is the deliberate pursuit of the interests of others or of the interests of civilization itself. The idea then, is that one sacrifices one's own interests, or at least the pursuit thereof, to allocate resources to the pursuit of helping others. However, there is no person who knowingly sacrifices his own interests for those of another, there is always some benefit that one derives out of sacrifice. An argument might arise, what about someone who sacrifices his life for another? Which is a reasonable argument. A person who sacrifices his life for another does so because he reveres and adores such a person, and he goes to his death knowing that such a person will continue to live a successful life because of his death; there is a moral satisfaction gained from his death.

Some others will argue, what about philanthropist such as Rockefeller and Gates? Another decent, if predictable argument. Philanthropy, however, is not altruism, because men such as Rockefeller and Gates did not amass their wealth by pursuing the interests of others and giving their wealth to the poor. Only after they have achieved their aims is it possible and permissible for them to give some of their wealth away. Even after they have achieved their wealth there is significant benefit to be gained from giving some of that wealth away, not the least of which are tax deductions and moral adulation.

The truth is, then, that altruism is only existent in cooperation with behavioral economics. In that, the giving of one's resources or the sacrifice of one's possessions is only permissible when one has something greater to gain from such a sacrifice. The opportunity cost of keeping oneself isolated from the problems of the world must be higher than the cost of giving some of one's resources away for altruism to be considered by the even smallest of minds.

On Subsidies

I have been reading recently, along with all the other members of the W.P. Carey Academy, Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded. While I by no means agree with him on most issues, his opinion, is, at least for the time being, worth my time. In his book, however, Mr. Friedman makes references to the exponential economic growth of formerly lagging countries namely India and China. He states that one of the reasons for this growth is the extensive efforts of these governments to target inflation in their economies.

This inflation is mostly seen by the bourgeois consumer in the form of fuel and appliances, both of which have been heavily subsidized by these governments. Both India and China have been spending large portions of their respective national budgets to purchase fuel and middle class appliances at market prices and then sell it to their respective citizens at lower prices. The intent of this is to protect consumers from rising commodity prices that accompany significant economic growth while still reaping the benefits of economic growth in other market sectors.

The idea of government subsidizing any x good was something which occupied my mind for most of the day after reading that. Why is it wrong for government to subsidize a good? The good is still being purchased in the market, so the demand remains constant, and the consumer avoids taxes on a federal product. Isn't this a logical solution to a common problem?

No. Because, as I realized upon further thought, the governments main source of income is my tax dollar. So, those subsidized commodities are being purchased with my tax dollars at market price and then being sold back to me at a lower price. Aren't I essentially losing money if I drive more that the average American does? And even if I don't drive more than the average American, I am paying taxes for those that do. In addition to this, as the market price rises, the government will require more and more money to maintain these subsidies, to the extent that it will require a tax increase. So, the consumer pays extra taxes as well as a discount price for a commodity he could have purchased in the market himself for perhaps two thirds of the price.

This led me to contemplate whether any government subsidies are effective. In light of the impending health care package this seems to be a worthy topic. To find a solution it is necessary to first find the purpose of a subsidy. The purpose then, or at least one sufficient for our goal is one of two things; either to provide the citizen with a good not otherwise available or to provide an incentive for the citizen to purchase a particular good. The subsidy is not a tool to be used to fight inflation. So to answer the question, there are effective subsidies, but, as we live in a capitalist nation, those effective subsidies lie only in the domain of incentives.

An education subsidy, perhaps. A subsidized undergraduate degree would not only significantly increase the number of graduate and doctoral degree holders, but would also allow the government a medium through which it could educate the citizen on the most pressing issues of the national agenda. Subsidized health center membership and personal training. Efficient energy subsidies of even greater magnitude than the ones being implemented now. But government subsidized fuel hardly fits into either of these categories.