Assisted Suicide

There was a great discussion on the Michael Smerconish show Monday night. He is really the only politically-oriented radio talk show I can listen to. Liberals (big L) and Conservatives (big C) all have this terrible tendency to spout off extreme views because it is better for ratings. After a few times, they start believing their own drivel and it just gets worse. And since usually the most extreme people are the ones who call in, the rest of the conversation gets even worse. But Smerconish largely stays away from that. He has to get a little titillating to keep his ratings up, but not by being extremist.

So his discussion of assisted suicide (the death of Dr. Kevorkian was the starting point) was really good. I recommend listening to the audio on his web site if you have some time. He is a libertarian (small l) so he thinks that people should be able to decide for themselves their end of life decisions. And as a former lawyer, he had some good advice about being explicit in a living will to make sure that your preferences get followed. And when extremists on either side called in, he was very logical and methodical in cutting them down, or at least differentiating the situations when their view would be appropriate and when it would not (this is the talent I like most about his show).

Paul Revere Controversy

OK, I have to chime in on the Sarah Palin Paul Revere controversy because the truth is that everyone is taking away the wrong lesson from this. I would be willing to bet that 99% of the US population doesn’t know the real story of Paul Revere. What we know comes from movies, the famous poem, mythology, and maybe Schoolhouse Rock. We are not War of Independence scholars. So I don’t blame Sarah Palin for being wrong.

But, I am still really bothered by this and her previous gaffes. She seems way too willing to talk about things she doesn’t know about. It’s OK to do this in bars with your friends, but a qualified president (or governor) should have two responses when they aren’t sure of the correct answer in public. They should either keep their mouths shut, or they should consult with experts and their advisers and confirm what the right answer is. It would scare me to have a president who blurts out incorrect things to the press or to foreign dignitaries or even to Congress. This could really hurt our standing in the world and degrade our ability to exert influence around the world. It is this that scares me the most about her and why I would cringe if she ever again held a position of power.

Remodeling the prison system

An interview I heard last night was really though provoking. The interviewee has a very interesting perspective on getting prison costs down. As you probably know, we have an overcrowding problem in most states and we spend a huge amount of money per year per prisoner. This person was an expert in brain tumors and mental health. He told a story about one guy who was totally normal and then all of a sudden became a pedophile. It turned out, he had a brain tumor pushing against his amygdala. Once they removed it, his pedophilia went away and he was back to normal. The problem was that he was convicted of a pedophilia-related crime in between. So what do you do with such a person? 20 years in jail would be a waste of resources once he was cured, but you don’t want him to get off totally scott free either. The interviewee suggested three categories:

1. People who don’t have a mental cause or have an untreatable cause for their crime go to regular jail like we do now.
2. People who have a chronic but treatable mental cause for their crime go to a mental facility where they are required to take their meds. If their criminal tendencies go away when on the meds, this can be a relatively low security, low stress type of place.
3. People who have a surgically treatable or otherwise curable mental cause (like a removable tumor) get the surgery and then get more of a community service type punishment. It would compensate society for his criminal act but would also not ruin the life of someone who, if not for a medical condition, wouldn’t have committed the crime in the first place.

Thoughts? It makes a lot of sense to me.

Possibilian

Religion – possibilian. I heard David Eagleman talk about this on an NPR interview. He has a very logical mind. So he doesn’t want to accept that there is a supernatural deity just on faith. But his incredible knowledge of the universe tells him that there is a good chance that some plane of existence has a G-d of some kind. So it’s possible. He calls himself a possibilian. It’s kind of like an agnostic, except that he is actively seeking evidence. It’s not his main work. He does astrophysics or some really impressive thing like that. But in his physics, he sees G-D. Or at least the possibility thereof. So he took up a hobby of writing novels that are set in planes of existence very different from our own. And in some of them, there are some kinds of G-D. For example he has one about a hypothetical afterlife. This allows his to experiment in his mind about what the existence of a g-d would mean.

Rational response to climate?

I just read a great (but too scientific to post for most people - ask me for citation) on some rainfall research.

It was great because in the heated debate of climate change, it was remarkably neutral and objective and practical. Their research shows that the rise in carbon started between 300 and 1000 years ago. So it was way before humans started emitting carbon. But it has sped up recently, so we are probably making it worse.

The result that they are worried about (and the subject of their research) is that the band of good rainfall is moving north. By the year 2100, the land between the equator and Arizona/Florida/Italy/S. China/etc. will not be suitable for farming.

So we have two choices. We can keep arguing about who is to blame and have to deal with the results rapidly and painfully in 50 years or we can agree that it is both natural and human-caused, start now, do it gradually, and hopefully without much pain.

My favorite option is the urban model. The idea is to create high rises that have shopping on the bottom, then offices above, then housing above that, and then hydroponic farming units at the top. Each building could be totally self-sustaining when necessary, but for variety's sake they can all be different (different shops, different companies, different food growing, different types of condos). And they can be done in low rainfall areas.

The other option is to start moving farms from currently fertile areas in the soon to be dry zone northwards. We have lots of available land in Alaska that will become very fertile when the band gets there (again, by 2100).

Both of these would be rough to shift to in 10 years, but we have 80-90 or so if we start now.