Cutting Corners

Over the last two days I refereed about 19 hour-long games at a youth soccer tournament. People are always moving around the fields during these games, and inevitably they cut the corners of the fields to save about five seconds on their trips to and from the concession stands. It pisses me off to know end because they are in my way while I am trying to ref (especially when I am the assistan referee and I have to run up and down the touchline), but I do understand why people do this. They are evolutionarily inclined to cut corners.

Cutting the corner saves about five seconds. Just like water takes the path of least resistance because is conserves the potential energy of the water, so to do humans save energy when they cut corners. That is five seconds more of energy that our ancestors had to run from a predator, which could have been the difference between life and death. This means that the proto-human monkeys that survived and passed their genes on to us - the corner cutters of today, were those that had the corner cutting genes.

The only thing that could be a bit confusing about this is how there can be a gene to cut corners. Sure your shoe size has some hereditary predicatability, but not complex brain function. I would agree that cutting corners isn't just one gene, but rather an entire complex of cerebral proteins that developed alongside other cognitive abilities over millions of years, but nonetheless the habit did develop as a result of evolution.

So, to all you corner cutters, I'll get over it. I understand why you do it. But to all of you stray brothers and sisters that awkwardly glance up at me to see if I'll say anything because you know that you shouldn't cut the corner of the soccer field, I hope a cheetah catches you and eats you and all your genes for dinner.

The Scottish Case

Up until March 24, 1603 (the date of Queen Elizabeth I's death) England and Scotland, two kingdoms on the same islands, were completely separate, with different capitals, different allies, and most importantly, different allies. On that date, King James VI of Scotland, the heir-apparent due to some daft English politics, was proclaimed the King of England as well, with the regnal title King James I.

The independence that Scotland enjoyed up through this date was a source of national pride. For hundreds of years the people of Scotland had fought to preserve their independce from England. Their national heroes were wrought from these wars, and their kings were descendents of the wars' victors.

For over one hundred years the Stuart Kings ruled both independent nations, each with its own parliament and capital. However, on May 1, 1707, Queen Anne's Act of Union came into effect. The Act of Union was law passed by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland. It merged the two nations and the two parliaments, and joined their monarchs under one crown, creating Great Britain or the United Kingdom. Scottish opposition to the Act was strong, but it nonetheless passed through the Edinburgh based parliament. England and Scotland were both still considered sovereign states by the Act, but they could exert no independent initiative. They wholly acted as Great Britain, with its capital and parliament very far from Scotland in London.


For nearly 300 years, until 1999 Scotland had no parliament. All decisions were made in London. However, due to nationalist sentiments, Tony Blair spearheaded the campaign for the establishment of a new Scottish Parliament, which now sits in Edinburgh with jurisdiction over domestic affairs.

The people of Scotland feel as if they were taken over by England. History stands in the face of this assumption, but nonetheless the sentiment persists. When James became the first monarch of both nations he explicitly intended to bring Scotland under English auspices. Although legally they are wholly independent nations of each other, governance for Scotland, for the majority of the last 300 years has been based in England. English kings and queens now rule the Scottish country. Although the ascension of a Scottish King on to the English throne makes it seem nearly as if Scotland took over England, the opposite feels the case.

And so we come to the affairs of the present. The 300th anniversary of The Union, felt with disdain in Scotlan, was just two days before general elections in Scotland. The Scottish Nationalist Party, campaigning on a platform of Socttish independence won majority in this election, and it is their intention to repeal the Act of Union of 1707. The extent to which they will be sucessful is not the basis of this post, but rather the impetus for such an action.

Divorce Rates

Watch Dr. Phil. He loves divorce and the high rates of it in the United States (and in other developed countries, such as South Korea and the EU). Often, these rates are linked to moral degredation. However, I wonder if increasing divorce rates are rather the result of other trends in society.
It isn't any secret that women have some more social liberties nowadays. More and more females work, and single mothers aren't scrutinized quite like Ms. Pryne was anymore. I wonder if divorce rates are results of this trend rather than moral degredation which people love to talk about.
More evidence of this is that in non-developed countries, where women remain repressed and religious stigma remains preminent, divorce rates have not increased as hey have in developed countries in the last half-century. I guess, maybe to frame the hypothesis a bit more clearly, the increase in divorce rates isn't a result of moral degredation: immorality has been around the whole time, but only now do women have a recourse against it.

Nurature?

On March 4th I wrote about my views about the nurture vs. nature debate. I sided with nurturalists. However, my views were skewed by my belief that nurture and nature are mutually exclusive. Today (in biology class) I learned otherwise.

In 1965, François Jacob and Jacques Monod, along with Andre Lwoff were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for discovering the lac operon. (lac being lactose). Basically, the lac operon is a component of the DNA of E. Coli bacteria, although operons are present in the DNA of all organisms. This particular operon was the first discovered and is the canon example. E. Coli usually consume glucose. Sometimes though glucose isn't available, but E. Coli have evolved mechanisms that break down lactose into the two components of its di-compound figure (two different compouns fused together): glucose and galactose. Glucose can then be consumed by the bacteria as normal. However, making the protein that breaks down lactose - Beta-Galactosidase) take energy to such an extent (like making all proteins) that it is disadventagious to the cell. Therefore, the cell has evolved a mechanism to supress the synthesis of Beta-Galactosidase unless lactose is present. This mechanism is the lac operon.

In other words, the natural functioning of the cell can be altered by environmental conditions. Nurture and nature collide. Colbert features nurature as The Word. Opponents of the homosexual agenda implode. Gay marriage is allowed. Conservates submit to sepuku. The world ends. Obviously not. I don't know the extent of the impacts of operons, plus they've been known for a long time so I'm sure scientists have considered this, so I guess the lesson of the post is don't dichotomize nurture and nature (like I did, on March 4th).

Holt: Math Murders

Math Murders

By JIM HOLT

Published: March 12, 2006

Counting the dead is a paradoxical business. Suppose I told you that around 150 million people have died over the last century in wars, genocides, man-made famines and other atrocities. This number might evoke in you a certain horror. But it is, of course, only a wild guess. Its very vagueness lends it an air of unreality. Yet what purpose would be served by making it more precise? Where mass death is concerned, the moral significance of scale seems to be one of those things that our brains aren't equipped to handle. A single life may have infinite value, but the difference between a million deaths and a million and one strikes us as negligible.

The moral meaning of death counts is further obscured by their apparent lack of objectivity. Take the war in Iraq. How many Iraqi civilians have died as a consequence of the American invasion? Supporters of the war say 30,000, a number that even President Bush finally brought himself to utter late last year. Opponents of the war say more than 100,000. Surely there must be a fact of the matter. In practice, though, there are only competing methodologies and assumptions, all of which yield different numbers. Even if we could put politics aside and agree on one, it would be hard to say what it meant. Does it matter, for instance, that the higher estimate of 100,000 is the same order of magnitude as the number of Iraqi Kurds that Saddam Hussein is reckoned to have killed in 1987 and 1988, in a genocidal campaign that, it has been claimed, justified his forcible removal?

"It is painful to contemplate that despite our technologies of assurance and mathematics of certainty, such a fundamental index of reality as numbers of the dead is a nightmarish muddle," wrote Gil Elliot in his 1972 volume, "The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead." Figuring out the number of man-caused deaths is rarely as straightforward as counting skulls in a mass grave. You can kill people with bombs, guns and machetes, but there are also more indirect ways: causing them to die of starvation, say, or of exposure or disease. (The disease need not be indirect — witness the radiation victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Of the nearly two million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, for instance, perhaps half were executed outright. By contrast, in the ongoing civil war in the Congo — the deadliest conflict since World War II — 2 percent of the estimated 3.9 million victims have died of direct violence; the rest perished when their subsistence-level lives were disrupted by the war.

Quantifying man-made death thus means, at the very least, having an idea of the rate at which people die naturally. And that entails recordkeeping. In 17th-century Europe, registers kept by church parishes — dates of baptisms, marriages and burials — made it possible to gauge the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War, which was deadlier for civilians than for soldiers. The last century, strange to say, has not always matched this level of demographic sophistication. Even in the case of Nazi Germany, supposedly a model of efficiency, the implementation of the Final Solution was so chaotic that the number of victims can be known only to the nearest million.

If our methodology of counting man-made deaths is crude, our moral calculus for weighing the resulting numbers is even cruder. Quantification, it is often thought, confers precision and objectivity. Yet it tells us very little about comparative evil. We feel that Hitler was every bit as evil as Stalin, even though Stalin was far more successful in murdering people (in part because he had a longer run). Mao may have been more successful still; in their recent book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," Jung Chang and Jon Halliday estimate that the Chinese leader was responsible for "well over 70 million deaths," which would come to nearly half of the total number of man-made deaths in the 20th century. In relative terms, however, Mao is easily eclipsed by Pol Pot, who directed the killing of more than a quarter of his fellow Cambodians.

Raw death numbers may not be a reliable index of evil, but they still have value as a guide to action. That, at least, is the common-sense view. It is also part of the ethical theory known as utilitarianism, which holds that sacrificing x lives to save y lives is always justified as long as y is greater than x. This utilitarian principle is often invoked, for example, in defense of President Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed between 120,000 and 250,000 Japanese civilians, on the assumption that the death toll would have been worse had the war been prolonged.

Yet some thinkers (like the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe) have questioned whether, morally speaking, numbers really count. In a choice between saving 5 lives and saving 10, they ask, why should we be dutybound to act in behalf of the greater number? Because, you say, it would be worse for 10 people to die than for 5 people. They reply: Worse for whom? Arithmetic misleads us into thinking that deaths aggregate the way numbers do. Yet in reality there are only individuals suffering. In a dilemma where the deaths of one group of people or another is unavoidable, why should someone have to die merely by reason of being in the smaller group?

This sort of skepticism about the significance of numbers has some perverse consequences. It implies that all atrocities have an equal command on our moral attention, regardless of scale.

Yet a refusal to aggregate deaths can also be ethically salubrious. It helps us realize that the evil of each additional death is in no way diluted by the number of deaths that may have preceded it. The ongoing bloodbath in Darfur has, all agree, claimed an enormous number of victims. Saying just how many is a methodological nightmare; a ballpark figure is a quarter of a million, but estimates range up to 400,000 and beyond. Quantitatively, the new deaths that each day brings are absorbed into this vast, indeterminate number. Morally, they ought to be as urgent as those on the first day of the slaughter.

Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.

In Spatial Terms

The last few days (especially yesterday - I did a lot of driving an skiing) I have been thinking about how we perceive space. Pretty much, we look at it in terms of lines - those lines being the roads that we drive on and live off of. However, this can't be how things were in spatial terms forever, because we didn't always have roads. Sure the Romans had some, but thorughout most of the Middle Ages they were in disrepair. Rather, the forests were what we had to navigate, and seafarers traversed currents and wind trends. That is a big shift from some seeming random events to the predictably linear roads we now live.

So then, would recreational skiing ever have been accepted in the non-linear world of today? I doubt it. Recreational skiining implies lines, because all trails are fixed lines. This also accounts for the appeals of glades (runs through trees with no cleared trails). Glades are a novelty at most mountains, and pretty popular, for no apparent reason except that they are different. They are different in that they don't adopt the contional linear trails practice but rather take caution in allowing people to ski freely (in fact many mountains heavily post warning about glades, becuase they are a bit more perilous than the open trails). I would describe glades as a modern event.

With the modernity of glades in mind I would propose that a certain mountain in Montana that only has glades, no conventional trails is thepostmodern ski mountain, finishing the progression from the classical to the denying postmodern. Any thoughts?

The Quantification of Rights - 1.5

Anyone who is interested in my blogging about quantifying rights I would highly recommend that you read the article from this week's New York Times Magazine "Math Murders" by Jim Holt. It pretty much says what I say, but just better because he is a better writer than I am. The article is posted following this post.

Spanglish

Today in my Spanish class a reading we had sparked a conversation on Spanglish, and if its use is proper or not. My argument was that it was, simply because communication is communication, and if it works, let it be becuase it is doing what it should be doing.

Later on in the day I was doing some more thinking and thought of this. A communication system is like a gene. If it works it will stick around, get passed on from generation from generation, proliferate horizontally, and become well known. If a communication system is not practical, expect the "mutation" to die out in a generation or two.

An example: Esperanto. Esperanto wasn't understandable to people. Most people could already communicate, so Esperanto never had a chance to become a competitive language gene, because it wasn't practical. Now it only lives on the Google language option toolbar. Spanglish on the other hand has some practical use. Predominant English speakers can use it, and so can predominant Spanish speakers. Therefore, it is useful for transcultural communication between the two groups, and has some staying power as a good langauge gene. We'll only see with time.

Nurture vs. Nature

In a word: nurture.

For a human trait to be natural it has to be from the human genome. The human genome is passed on from generation to generation. Therefore, traits that favor allowing an organism to reproduce have a better chance of being passed on and multiplied. Homosexuality does not favor sexual reproduction for obvious reasons, therefore it is unlikely that 10% of the population codes for it.

Another natural explanation could be mutation. Random mutations of the genes of a human could lead to homosexuality. However, having 10% of a population randomly mutate the same gene is a statistic that far surpasses the rate of mutation in the genome. Therefore, there would have to be a natural explantion as to why a particular gene mutates more often than any other gene in the world.

Amidst those odds, I would negate any claims that homosexuality is nature. Howver, I'm already skeptical of me saying that it is nurtural. Could there be another reason besides nature or nurture? Who know. But I know that it is not natural.

Asymptotic Reality

For a long time people could not see cells. Then we saw cells only for a long time, before molecules were discovered. Molecules gave way to elements, which eventually gave way to the atom. Atoms begot subatomic particles (your good old protons, electrons, and neutrons), and yet still theese have been reduced to quarks, photons, neutrinos, etc..

And so it seems that matter, the stuff that animates reality (well, I guess energy animates it, but you know what I mean), comes closer and closer to completion without ever reaching it. The word for such a concept is an asymptote. Reality is asymptotic. We can get closer and closer to reducing it, but we never will, for everything we find takes space, so it is reduced further.

And this is the perplexment with reality. Even though something gets smaller and smaller, it never ceases to take up space. Currently we perceive reality as linear, but it is asymptotic in nature. And so is the fault in a reductionist mindset. A reductionist mindset perceives reality as linear, able to being reduced, but that is impossible, since reality is asymptotic, not linear.

Male/Female Syndrome

Over the last two days in biology class we have been learning about various genetic disorders. If note are those when X and Y chromosomes (the sex chromosomes that determine sex) do not segregate as they normally do. This nondisjunction can manifest itself in various ways. Turner Syndrome is when a person has only one X chromosome in their cells. Normally, females have two X's, and males have an X and a Y. Klinfelter's Syndrome is when someone has two X's and a Y. THe list goes on.

What I'm commenting on is the fact that we don't label XX or XY syndromes, but rather we call them normal. The normal sex chromosome arrangement is arranged in the same process (meiosis) that arranges the aforementioned genetic syndromes, so why do we not also have Male Syndrome and Female Syndrome alongside Klinfelter and Turner? The sex of zygotes are determined by near-random processes out of the hands of humans, and so are the processes that lead to chromosome nondisjunction, so why the difference?

Obviously, the answer lies in statistical probabilty. Males (XY) and females (XX) are statisitically probable, while trisomy is statistically improbable. Why then is statistical probability the variable that we utilize to define the norm? I'll throw in an answer that I just thought of (unlike many philobloggers are don't prepare my posts - I write and see where it takes me). Last week I read Claude-Levi Strauss's Myth and Meaning a short summary of some lectures he once gave. In it is pointed out that humans organize things into dualisms. There is only right and left, male or female, yes or no, justice or injustice, ad infinitum. I believe he atributes this to the distinction between the two lobes of the brain. The TWO lobes.

When processing sex humans are inclined to construct a dulaism for the concept. Since mostly observed (hence statistically probable) are XY's and XX's, we end up with male and female as a norm and all else sequestered as syndromatic. Hence, we have why there is no such thing as Male or Female Syndrome.

The Veil of Ignorance

Recently, I've been arguing with someone about teh veil of ignorance. Since neither of us have a copy of A Theory of Justice handy, I'm posting here to see if anyone else can clear this up for me.

When one makes a decision, to act from behind the veil of ignorance, are they to shed their status in society, or remove themselves from society in total. I have been arguing that one is only to remove their status in society so that any decision could possibly affect them, thus guiding their decisions. Others claim that you remove yourself completely from society so that your decision is completely objective. I would counter this by saying that this conception of the veil of ignorance isn't true to Rawls, but rather to Rousseau. A decision maker completely withdrawn from where the decision is to be implemented is what the Law Giver does. Someone acting in the Veil of Ignorance on the other hand, although not completely detached, acts without knowledge of their own position because it allows them to walk in the shoes of everyone that their decision affects, becuase they would naturally speculate how the decision could affect them. They could be in any pair of shoes.

I'll give an example to clear it up. Eminent domain. If you detach yourself from your position in society you would be against eminent domain becuase you could be the one with the condemned land. But if you detached yourself entirely from the community you would probably be pro-eminent domain because you could only consider the benefits to the community but not consider the individual impact.

Which is it? Or maybe neither.

Saul Kripke

Yesterday I read in the New York Times an article about Saul Kripke. The journalist characterized Kripke as the greatest living philosopher, but I've never heard of him. Have any of you? Is the article an understatement, an overstatement, or just right? What is his main thesis? Is he worth reading at an introductory level? Do let me know.

Horizontal Politics

Although recently I have been reading multitudes of non-fiction (in fact I just completed Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and an introduction to the philosophy of political science is on the way from the library), my favorite books I suppose will never cease to be Tolkien's works. Today, thinking about all the different races that populate his lands, I superficially applied some philosophical thought to Middle-Earth. Mainly, I was pondering political workings, the social contract, and other political applications.
All of the philosophers that have worked in the political sphere have worked within a certain parameter: humans are the only rational beings capable of politics. However, in Tolkien's works different rational species copopulate the same land. Tolkien's political organizations compensate for this in two manners. First, the races do not live within the same sovereign borders. This eliminates horizontal as well as vertical hierarchies (can you even call them hierarchies if they are horizontal)? Secondly, political boundaries and actions are partially decided upon by lucid communication with the Gods, which aids in quelling disputes. These two aspects of Tolkien's organization make the organization of Middle-Earth politics like that of Earth: different states, representing different races, vying for power. Replace races with species, and you have Middle Earth.
However, what I wondered was how would horizontal integration into political organizations influence politics? Frankly, I don't believe that these sorts of organizations could exist peacefully. When humans bicker over different needs, desires, values, resources, etc., in communities, these differences are relics of culture. Cultures which all exist within the parameters of the human mind and body and so can be reconciled with the same mechanisms. However, when different physiology creates differences, they are inherent and can't be reconciled, but must be recognized and provided for. Therefore, horizontal coexistence is nota viable method of copopulation since conflicts cannot be peacefully resolved.

Moral\laroM/moraL\Larom

Today I realized that in a day students (at least at my high school) are exposed to a new moral system that we are urged to embrace by our teachers. Health class is just a semester of statistics that attempt to scare students out of certain activities. Statistics and number lend themselves to a utilitarian system in which the number of dead people is what we measure. Social Studies and history classes take up the other end of the spectrum. In analyzing the wrongs of the past we are meant to soak up that we cannot use others as a means to an end: deontology. English literature follows another path. In studying the virtues and heroics of novel characters we soak up altruistic tendencies of characters. Science classes are mainly void of moral lessons. Gym class i mainly amoral, valuing the dominance of the fittest (in literal terms).
Some may say that this is a positive affect of school: it exposes students to various plausible value systems which they can choose from. However, this isn't what the teachers demonstrate. THe teachers all send the message that they agree on moral issues categorically. In other words, they believe more or less the same moral system. How then can they teach conflicting versions?
You can extrapolate implications galore from this analysis, but I just wanted to expose the contradiction more than hypothesize its harms (if they do exist). What do you think?

Baltimore Sun: Brothers Killed Driving Home From Wedding

Brothers Killed Driving Home from Wedding

Two Carroll County brothers were killed when their speeding car jumped a guardrail and hit two trees as they returned from their sister's wedding early yesterday, police said.

David Speicher Booth, 22, who was driving, and Michael Lippincott Booth, 35, both of the 3400 block of Green Meadow Lane in Union Mills, were killed instantly.

Another passenger, Alyse I. Vanepps, 24, of Millville, Pa., was flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where she was in serious but stable condition, police said.

The accident, which occurred at 1:20 a.m., took place on a curving section of Halter Road in Union Mills, in a 35-mph zone.

The car, a 1998 Subaru Forester, slid along the guardrail for 40 feet before going over it, striking a ditch and then the trees, according to Cpl. Anthony Riley of the Maryland State Police.

The elder Booth was sitting on Vanepps' lap in the passenger seat at the time of the accident. They had been bringing wedding gifts home for their sister, Riley said.

Police said speed and driver error appeared to have caused the accident.

Police were continuing their investigation yesterday.

Death and Numbers

On Friday I unfortuantely attended the funeral of my friend Dave Booth. Dave was killed in a car accident alongside his brother driving home from his sister's wedding. Dave was a counselor at camp from 2001 - 2005 and in addition was the counselor in Cabin 13 in 2002, when I was a camper. I really liked him. He was 22. I posted a local article following this one if your are interested.

Time after time I have heard that the tragedy in his death is his age. Again I see this as a quantification of something that should have a nebulous value. If youth implies value than one could say that tyrants are logical in forcing parents to kill themselves in order to spare the lives of their children. No!

A life should not be measured by the breaths it has taken. I wouldn't even call a brain dead person's existence a life. Life should not be measured! In its lack of quality lies its value. What would the Mona Lisa be if the cost of the paint used and the canvas was only adjusted for inflation? I suppose little. What too, would a life be if it was only identified by an equation adding oxygen and food? I do not know if or what signifies the value of life, but I know age is not it.

1 Year

Today, the Pubescent Philosopher is more or less one year old. That is to say that the Earth was in the same place in space 365 days ago as it is today. The Pubescent Philosopher started out as a Xanga supplement to my boring everyday blog, and it quickly became a philosophical exposition. The Xanga began one year ago, so here it is one year later.

Analyzing all of the post, a recurring theme I see is the condemnation of just about everything that is. If something is pretty routine and widely accepted, I have gotten to it already or will eventually. In the past year I have also read many philosophical texts. They include:

Freedom Evolves - Daniel Dennett
Finite and Infinite Games -James P. Carse
Orientalism - Edward Said
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Rights From Wrongs - Alan Dershowitz

I have dabbled, but not completed some others. Currently I'm reading something not philosophical but a topic that I believe fits in - Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The only book I gave up on was Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard. Maybe something got lost in translation, but I just didn't get it. It's funny; you can tell exactly how far I made it in the book because my feverish notes in the margins just abruptly end. I did get a 100 on an English project thanks to the book though.

I addition, besides for the books I already have in mind that I would like to read, I would like to immerse myself in non-European modern philosophy. The only non-European or American on my Amazon Wish List currently is Peter Singer, an Australian. I have read a little about African philosophy, but I'm not interested because it seems to only be about the continent, not philosophy applied to a wide range of things that comes from Africa. Any suggestions?

This time next year I hope to know where I will be studying philosophy in college. So until next year, blog on.

Friedman: A Shah with a Turban

A Shah With a Turban

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 23, 2005

I'd like to thank Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his observation that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews was just a "myth." You just don't see world leaders expressing themselves so honestly anymore - not about the Holocaust, but about their own anti-Semitism and the real character of their regimes.

But since Iran's president has raised the subject of "myths," why stop with the Holocaust? Let's talk about Iran. Let's start with the myth that Iran is an Islamic "democracy" and that Ahmadinejad was democratically elected.

Sure he was elected - after all the Iranian reformers had their newspapers shut down, and parties and candidates were banned by the unelected clerics who really run the show in Tehran. Sorry, Ahmadinejad, they don't serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, they don't allow bikinis at nudist colonies, and they don't call it "democracy" when you ban your most popular rivals from running. So you are nothing more than a shah with a turban and a few crooked ballot boxes sprinkled around.

And speaking of myths, here's another one: that Iran's clerics have any popularity with the broad cross-section of Iranian youth.

This week, Ahmadinejad exposed that myth himself when he banned all Western music on Iran's state radio and TV stations. Whenever a regime has to ban certain music or literature, it means it has lost its hold on its young people. It can't trust them to make the "right" judgments on their own. The state must do it for them. If Ahmadinejad's vision for Iran is so compelling, why does he have to ban Beethoven and the Beatles?

And before we leave this subject of myths, let me add one more: the myth that anyone would pay a whit of attention to the bigoted slurs of Iran's president if his country were not sitting on a dome of oil and gas. Iran has an energetic and educated population, but the ability of Iranians to innovate and realize their full potential has been stunted ever since the Iranian revolution. Iran's most famous exports today, other than oil, are carpets and pistachios - the same as they were in 1979, when the clerics took over.

Sad. Iran's youth are as talented as young Indians and Chinese, but they have no chance to show it. Iran has been reduced to selling its natural resources to India and China - so Chinese and Indian youth can invent the future, while Iran's young people are trapped in the past.

No wonder Ahmadinejad, like some court jester, tries to distract young Iranians from his failings by bellowing anti-Jewish diatribes and banning rock 'n' roll.

What is a fact is the danger someone like Ahmadinejad would pose if his country developed a nuclear weapon. But that is where things are heading. Iran today has so much oil money to sprinkle around Europe, it doesn't worry for a second that the Europeans would ever impose real sanctions on Tehran for refusing to open its nuclear program.

"The West has lost its leverage," notes Gal Luft, an energy expert at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Europe is addicted to Iran's oil and to Iran's purchases of European goods. At the same time, the Iranian regime has been very clever at petro-diplomacy.

After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, "the Iranians knew they needed an insurance policy," Mr. Luft added, "So they did two things: they concentrated on developing a bomb and went out and struck gas deals with one-third of humanity - India and China," the world's two fastest-growing energy consumers. So it is highly unlikely that China would ever allow the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran.

The whole world seems to be getting bought off these days by oil. Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, just became chairman of a Russian-German gas pipeline project - controlled by the Russian government - that he championed while in office. The man just stepped down as the leader of Germany and now he's working for the Russians! I guess Jack Abramoff was not available.

The word from the White House is that President Bush is trying to figure out a theme for his State of the Union speech and for his next three years. Mr. President, what more has to happen - how many more Katrinas, how much more reckless behavior by Iran, how many more allies bought off by petro-dollars - before you realize that there is only one thing to do for the next three years: lead America and the world in an all-out push to conserve energy, reduce dependence on oil and develop alternatives?

Because three more years of $60-a-barrel oil will undermine everything good in the world that the U.S. wants to do - and that's no myth.

Divestiture

Today, I steer away from philosophy and into foreign affairs for this post. Thomas Friedman's op-ed this morning, A Shah with a Turban (posted after this), in the New York Times was about how President Bush and Europe is allowing Iran and its oil reserves to do anything they please. The United States is reluctant to impose sanctions in fear of East Asian repercussions (India and China receive the majority of Iran's oil), and Europe has similar qualms since the money Iran is invested throughout Europe. Friedman basically dare Bush to "do the right thing." Phat chance! You then might say that we are doomed - Iran will run rampant. I believe though that there is another way to influence Iran's actions.

My proposal doesn't come from the government, but from the private sector. In a word: divestiture. To end apartheid in South Africa companies (I believe that IBM spearheaded this assault) decreased their dealings with the nation, putting economic, not political pressure on the nation. And in light of this, apartheid was ended. Why don't companies around the world do the same thing for Iran? The private sector is private for a reason, so they are independent of the trepidation governments have over sanctioning Iran.

Thinking about this a little more, the effects of a divestment would most likely be coupled with the often discussed youth of Iran. They are the ones who enjoy the products of these companies, so they would have to spearhead the grassroots assault on their government for incurring the divestiture. Just maybe though, Iran's President's recent attempt to curb Western influence in his nation was truly an attempt to anesthetize the youth, making them immune to imminent divestiture.

We'll see.