On Dead Heads of State

Trials like that of Saddam Hussein serve a purpose beyond punitive and deterrent justice. The inter-related purposes of setting a record of truth, further discovery fueled by deeper investigation, full disclosure, and public education should arguably play an important, even dominant role. By limiting the charges against Saddam Hussein, justice was not served. It's easy to suspect that full disclosure would have seriously compromised the U.S. and so, not surprisingly, was scuttled. President Gerald Ford also underminded justice when he pardoned President Milhouse Nixon *before* he was convicted of anything. This prevented any investigation. I fear this established an unjust precedent enabling the imperial presidency as its crimes will not only go unpunished but unexposed.

Eco-Friendly in the Kitchen (Supplementary Info)

In the opening paragraph of Eco-Friendly in the Kitchen, I'm the husband referred to but not seen in the picture. Admittedly, my buckteeth and hairy chest and feet aren't photogenic, but that doesn't prevent me from providing supplementary information.

First, regarding kitchen renovation, the greenest thing you can probably do is make do with the crap you have now. Until our society comprehensively implements cradle-to-cradle technology adcovated by Bill McDonough, initiating economic activity of the sort we did will inevitably lead to environmental degradation. Foremost, do no harm, right? Our only chance at remediating the damage we did, is to pay someone to restore something else somewhere else. Though unsurprisingly I couldn't find a kitchen-renovation calculator, there are carbon-offset calculators that we will use creatively to calculate how much money we should give to effect the positive change we feel obligated to make. You can also check out this carbon offset resource page or do a google search to find others appropriate for your needs. But we could have simply given money without re-doing the kitchen, never incurring the damages we've wrought.

And if you choose to give your old stuff away on craigslist.com like we did, be careful of the frenzy of activity you will create by listing it as free. I advise charging something just to keep the response rate reasonably low. In trying to manage the frenzy, I'm sure I angered a few people and heard a couple of sob stories about why somone deserved our free stuff more than someone else. Another mistake: our contractors managed the great give-away one morning while we were at work. The first guy to arrive took just about everything, leaving most of the other intended benefactees in the lurch! You can imagine the flaring tempers. I can tell ya, our contractor almost had to bury the claw of hammer into an irate guy who didn't get his free fridge. Consider freecycle.com or maybe the curbside where you don't have to deal with the public directly.

I still have doubts about the environmental friendliness of some of our products, especially as they poured in from China (the bamboo) and Portugal (the cork) in heavy, heavy boxes. The inherent waste of fuel in transporting materials half way around the world bothers me, not to mention the possible slave labor used in processing them. I wish we had been able to find local products. Maybe in time if demand grows and transportation costs climb, so will the local supply. Maybe others will have more luck.

We now own a number of appliances with stainless steel faces and the IceStone countertop that require periodic chemical applications to keep them looking good and in the case of the countertop, performing up to specifications. Without regular treatment, the IceStone will be prone to staining. We've found that even now, so soon after installation, it still stains easily. We didn't knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily sign up for that. So be more aware of the ongoing impact of your choices than us if you can.

This year's DC Green Festival comes to the convention center Sept. 24-25. There will be ten to fifteen companies specifically exhibiting green products for the home.

Finally, Lila mentioned that we use air-conditioning in the summer. True, but it's a heat pump, and we only cool the bedroom. Also, to try to minimize our ecological footprint, we've chosen to live where we can easily commute to work (Lila walks, I take metro). We partially renovated our kitchen as an alternative to moving to a bigger, more remote place deployed somewhere in the god-awful suburbs or exurbs. I'm glad we did. I'm convinced making our place more livable was the better option than sprawl.

A Brief Constitutional, Practical, and Moral Argument for Performing a Citizen's Arrest

Drop your veils of delusion and customary deference to authority and hear these words freshly, and as intently as an American pet owner might an ad pitching a cure for pet dander.

Starting from the top and working our way down:

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution says, in part: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States."

Ok, this tells me that no one's special and no one should expect to be -- nor ought they be -- treated with veneration or unquestioned obedience; and, in conjuction with other provisions in the Constitution, that no one is exempt from the law and lawful procedures. So, for example, the person occupying the office of the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, or a cabinet member are not royalty. They're citizens like you and me subject to the same rights and privileges, slings and arrows.

Article VI. Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution says in part: "... all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing [ancient parlance meaning Thang] in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

As an aside, consider the class of nimrods like John Bolton who claim international treaty law is bogus because there's no enforcement mechanism. Well, within the U.S., there's a pretty clear enforcement mechanism, since the judges in every state are bound to uphold treaties. It's just that the distict attorneys, judges, lawyers and politicians choose not to enforce the law. Though other countries probably have similar provisions, no doubt some don't. So the U.S. should stop obstructing international bodies from trying to enforce international law. Justice entails equal enforcment. Americans can't be subject to it if the Chadians aren't. It makes sense to create a venue for them, too, if their own countries don't provide legal remedies. And when countries have remedies but fail to enforce them, international courts make sense. But despite official inaction in America to enforce internanational law (crimes against peace, crimes of aggression, collective punishment), we law-abiding citizens do have a remedy.

Article IX of the U.S. Bill of Rights reads in full: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Ok, this tells me that you and I (and we collectively) retain the right to perform common law citizens' arrests, and that right and its exercise shall not be disparaged by all the naysayers out there. It also tells me that false arrest and kidnapping act, rightly, as deterrents to citizens from exercising this right recklessly. They must prepare themselves with a solid legal defense when they use it.

Although Bush doesn't commute to work or otherwise expose himself to the public without the presence of overwhelming force, consider that on their ways to serve their master, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's preposterously self-important motorcades not only disturb the peace every morning as they rumble and blare down Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues, respectively, (often between the hours of seven and eight a.m.); not only do they flout democratic decency and international law (how so I leave as an exercise of the reader to himself ponder and discover ), but more importantly they daily expose themselves to the mighty power and sovereignty of the U.S. citizenry.

Finally and most briefly, consider the banality of evil that Hanna Arendt warned us about: as good people sit around and do nothing, evil may fluorish.

What is an institution?

If you're curious, John Searle poses and preliminarily answers the question, "What is an institution?" [to his own satisfaction] in a stimulating theoretical [but non-mathematical] paper in the inaugural issue of the newly instituted Journal of Institutional Economics.

He presents key insights into what collective social truths are and how they're instituted. Which, of course, has implications for how they are to be changed which all of us should desperately be interested in these days. Ultimately, his perspective confirms what Albert J. Nock recognized when he fondly and rather resignedly quoted Edmund Burke:

"If a great change is to take place, the minds of men will be fitted to it."

The whole project of institutional economics [to me, convincingly] rejects the neo-classical idea that economics can or even should resemble physics with its relatively simple, timeless, a-historical formulas and rules describing a more-or-less fixed reality. And this paper is certainly in that vein.

You can spare yourself my [probably cryptic] rant by not reading any further, but I do have a few reservations with what Searle's written and I'd like to share, to wit:

1. His insistence on including human meaning in the formation of institutions to the exclusion of other considerations like impersonal evolutionary processes. Yes, any single human mind or institution would have been blind to its possible influence before the discovery and elaboration of Darwinian evolution. But it's now over 100 years on. So, Mr. Searle should consider that, for example, perhaps evolution endowed mankind (and other hominid species before us) with institutions (religion, war, diplomacy, marriage, etc.) because they had survival value.

   I realize that this deterministic thinking is in tension with the idea that economic thinking should not embrace timeless, unchanging ideas. But life (and lives) on earth, like human institutions are historical, contingent, fuzzy, sometimes redundant, even contradictory -- in a word messy. So I don't think I impose any rigidly deterministic requirements by calling for inclusion of our biological inheritance in trying to explain our current and often deplorable institutions; and

2. His emphasis on the centrality of language to the foundation of institutions unnecesarily exludes non-humans. Minimally, it would seem that other animals have institutions, for example reciprocity, hierarchies, pair-bonding, inter- and intra-generational learning and teaching, etc. Though he acknowledges some of these, he unconvincingly dismisses them. They should be explored, too; and
3. His ..., well, moral lapse in touting the limited liability corporation as a great human advance. I readily acknowledge that its creation was a great achievement in expanding the power of some humans, but not necessarily an advance for mankind in general (i.e. an improvement, if that's what he meant). As far as I can tell, it helped lay the foundation for imperialism and its attendant creation of widespread, longlasting, and ongoing human misery and alienation, cultural destruction and homogenization, ecological simplification and environmental degradation. Corporations do this precisely because of the great power they confer on sombunall, in no small because of limited liability.

This has a chance of making more sense if you read the paper. By the way, I write blogs like this as much to clarify my own thoughts for my own purposes as for your consideration. Sorry about that. I don't necessarily expect any comments. I hope it's not a nuisance. Fnord.

Katrina: Man-Made Calamity

As President Bush, FEMA spokesmen, other authorities, journalists and just plain folks continue to call Katrina a "natural" disaster -- thereby excusing themselves (and the project of American civilization) of any culpability -- consider the following, which, to my mind, casts it from a natural disaster into a failure-of-American-civilization-induced-by-hurricane:

1. Human-induced global warming played a probabilistic role in increasing the intensity of the storm.
2. Many poor families (the poverty rate is 38% in New Orleans) could not evacuate the city on their own. Either they had no (functioning) car or no money for gas or to get on a bus or taxi, etc. The car ownsership rate in N.O. is the lowest of any major U.S. city -- even lower than Manhattan. No authorities offered public assistance to these people to get out of town.
3. Underfunded, man-made and -maintained levees broke. In 2004 and 2005, the N.O. Times-Picayune cited the cost of the Iraq war as a cause of underfunding. The Bush administration doesn't readily accept nevermind plan for scientific predictions when they're inconvenient, costly, or contrary to its ideology. Bush doesn't even have a science advisor.
4. Federal preparation and response lacked speed and focus. When Bush moved FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security, its mission changed from preparation for and response to disasters, to just response. Furthermore, due to operations in Iraq, the Nat'l Guard lacked the personnel and resources it needed to respond timely and effectively.
5. Pollution fouled the flood waters. Before the flood, New Orleans had a superfund site within its city limits. As Hugh B. Kaufman, a analyst at the EPA, said in the Washington Post about the waste that will despoil N.O. in the years to come, "This is the worst case ... There is not enough money in the gross national product ofthe United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area." Dense human settlements and the oil industry belong on the same land only in special circumstances, certainly not where the settled land is below sea level, next to a huge lake above sea level.
6. That fact alone argues against the sprawling suburban settlement and investment in N.O that exploded during the past 20 to 50 years. The sprawl contributed to the extent of and hence expense and difficulty in maintaining the levees and other flood control devices. But city planners expanded their tax base anyway much to their own short-term prestige, and real estate developers, banks, lending agencies, insurance providers went a-dodgin' for a dime.
7. The underlying insensitivity (few call it racism) of many if not the majority of Americans resulted in a dearth of sympathy for the victims it seems because they were poor, urban, and predominantly black. Americans devote great time and resources to servicing the educated, affluent, and influential while they grow bewildered when faced with the needs of the ignorant, indigent, and ignored.
8. When it suits them, the Bush administration strongly purports to be "strict" constuctionists when interpreting the Constitution. So, you see, it was the state and local authorities who should have responded in Katrina's wake. They did not feel the twang of responsibility. Yet, when the Constitution clearly declares that only Congress shall declare war, Bush is unpersuaded. Or, when Article VI, Clause 3 states that all treaties (say the Geneva Conventions or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) shall be the law of the land, Bush seems to interpret its provisions rather loosely giving U.S. wide latitude in ignoring any strict meaning.