Attached to stuff.
I have hard time getting rid of stuff, not just things that I bought either, stuff that has been given to me that I hate and some that I think is scary.
I read something the other day and decided that I really should sell all of my stuff that really isn't important to have and really doesn't serve any purpose other than to just sit there. So there I was, going through all of my crap and I realized that everything I considered getting rid, the things that this article advised people to rid themselves of, I justify keeping it. I can't help it.
I need a cure from this...
So tell me friends, how do you get rid of stuff you like but don't use? Do you have any tips to help me get through this?
SLC Punk
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2521545091546372547&...
http://www.rubylane.com/shops/southerncharm/item/PO-1052
Something for us to learn from?
Today's lesson we had to discuss how different buildings evoke different emotions and for an example the architect and I brought in some music that had different moods. We would play one song and asked them how the song made them feel.
Well the first song that I played was the "The Star-Spangled Banner"; each kid in the room stood up, faced the flag, and placed their hands over their heart. I just thought it was awesome that these kids were so respectful and it really moved me. After the song was over we got a variety of responses: patriotic, strong, army, war, confident; most of the responses were pretty positive.
So how do you feel when "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played?
My problem with what the BBC reported in this video
Did the BBC report that since these beams are smaller that it required less fire proofing?
Total B.S.!
Fire proofing isn't determined by the beam size, it is determined by the size of building and what type of occupancy it is going to have.
If the reporter said that in the area of building the fire proofing required less that would be fine, because most buildings are broken up into different zones. Zone "A" may require a 1-hour fire-rating while zone "B" may require two hours. These normally are not consistent along the total path of a beam. In either case, the building still wouldn't be able to fall the way it did. The collapse would not have been symmetrical because of the fact that the fire damage is not symmetrical. Where the fire started there would have been more damage then where the fire ended up which means that the side with more damage would have been the first to fall.
Private Prisons:Profits of Crime
Private Prisons: Profits of Crime
By Phil Smith from the Fall 1993 issue of Covert Action Quarterly
Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities"created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality.
At Leavenworth, Kansas, within a perimeter of razor wire, armed prison guards in uniform supervise hundreds of medium- and maximum-security federal prisoners. Welcome to one of America's growth industries- private sector, for-profit prisons. Here in the shadow of the federally-run Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) runs a short-term detention facility for medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Under contract to the U.S. Marshal's Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the CCA Leavenworth facility is not an anomaly but part of a trend. In the last decade, from juvenile detention centers to county jails and work farms to state prison units to INS holding camps for undocumented aliens, private interests have entered the incarceration business in a big way. Where there are people detained, there are profits to be made.
Imprisonment is an ugly business under any regime, but the prospect of a privatized prison system raises difficult and disturbing questions beyond those associated with a solely state-operated prison system. It has been, after all, a common assumption that the criminalization and punishment of certain behaviors-the deprivation of physical liberty and even of life itself-are not amenable to private sector usurpation. Some of the arguments that inform this assumption are ethi cal, some legal, and others practical, but all are being chal lenged by a growing group of special interests.
Surprisingly, private prisons are nothing new in U.S. history. In the mid-1800s, penny-pinching state legislatures awarded contracts to private entrepreneurs to operate and manage Louisiana's first state prison, New York's Auburn and Sing Sing penitentiaries, and others. These institutions became models for entire sections of the nation where privatized prisons were the norm later in the century. These prisons were supposed to turn a profit for the state, or at least pay for themselves. Typically, privatization was limited: The state leased or contracted convict labor to private companies. In some cases, such as Texas, however, the corrections function was turned over wholesale to private interests which prom ised to control delinquents at no cost to the state. As the system spread, labor and businesses complained that using unpaid convict labor constituted "unfair" competition. Of equal concern to reformers-but of less weight to politicians-was the issue of prisoner abuse under the private corrections regime. Anecdotal evidence from across the country painted a grim picture: While state officials remained indifferent or were bought off by private interests, prisoners suffered malnourishment, frequent whippings, overwork and overcrowding. A series of investigations of state prisons confirmed the tales of horror and produced public outrage. l As with anti-trust legislation and the progressive reforms which followed, public pressure impelled government regulation of private sector abuse. By the turn of the century, concerted opposition from labor, business, and reformers forced the state to take direct responsibility for prisons, thus bringing the first era of private prisons to an end.
Three Trends Converge
But as the twentieth century stumbles to an end, the hard lessons of a hundred years ago have been drowned out by the clamor of free market ideologues. Again, privatization is encroaching ever further on what had been state responsibilities, and prison systems are the target of private interests. The shift to privatization coalesced in the mid-1980s when three trends converged: The ideological imperatives of the free market; the huge increase in the number of prisoners; and the concomitant increase in imprisonment costs. In the giddy atmosphere of the Reagan years, the argument for the superiority of free enterprise resonated profoundly. Only the fire departments seemed safe, as everything from municipal garbage services to Third World state enterprises went on sale. Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. This assortment of entrepreneurs, free market ideologues, cash-strapped public officials, and academics promised design and management innovations without re- ducing costs or sacrificing "quality of service." In any case, they noted correctly, public sector corrections systems are in a state of chronic failure by any measure, and no other politically or economically feasible solution is on the table.
More Prisoners, More Money
This contemporary push to privatize corrections takes place against a socioeconomic background of severe and seemingly intractable crisis. Under the impetus of Reaganite social Darwinism, with its "toughness" on criminal offenders, pris on populations soared through the 1980s and into the 1990s, making the U.S. the unquestioned world leader in jailing its own populace. By 1990, 421 Americans out of every 100,000 were behind bars, easily outdistancing our closest competitors, South Africa and the then USSR. By 1992, the U.S. rate had climbed to 455. In human terms, the number of people in jails and prisons on any given day tops 1.2 million, up from fewer than 400,000 at the start of the Reagan era.
While incarceration statistics have skyrocketed, crime rates have increased much more slowly. In fact, from 1975 to 1985, the serious crime rate actually decreased by 1.42 per cent while the number of state and federal prisoners nearly doubled. The number of people sent to prison is actually determined by policy decisions and political expediency. Politicians of all stripes have sought cheap political points by being "tough on crime." They throw oil on the fire of public panic by portraying the urban underclass (read: young, black males) as predator. Ignoring the broad context of economic policies that have effectively abandoned large segments of the population, they have instituted mandatory minimum sentences, tighter or no parole schedules, and tougher "good time" regulations. Adding to the overpopulation these putative measures wrought, the War on Drugs-which aimed its frenzy at the inner city-stuffed the nation's already over crowded prisons with a large crop of mostly African-American and Latino nonviolent offenders. In state after state, budgets have been stretched to the breaking point by the cost of maintaining and expanding this massive correctional archipelago. In California, the nation's largest state prison system, the corrections budget increased seven-fold during the 1980s to $2.1 billion annually at the end of the decade-and the system was still operating at 180 percent of capacity. The huge costs associated with the choice to deal with social problems by mass imprisonment are a fundamental part of the drift toward private prisons. The converging trends (rampant free-marketism, higher prison population, and escalating costs) are part of a larger trend-the sharpening of Reaganite class war and the social meanness that accompanied it. The last time the U.S. faced such an influx of prisoners was after the Civil War when freed blacks, who were previously punished and controlled within the slave system, were sent to formerly all-white prisons. The present situation is not perfectly analogous, but once again, policy-makers faced with burgeoning and unruly minority resistance of their own making seem to have chosen a similar course: "Lock 'em up and throw away the key."
The Buslnes of Punishment
Punishment is not only a crucial and ever-larger state function, it is also big business. Private ownership and/or operation of prisons, while an increasingly significant part of the corrections system, represents only a fraction of the "prison-industrial complex." The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year. This figure does not address existing overcrowding, which is pandemic from city jails to federal prisons. The public sector imprisonment industry employs more than 50,000 guards, as well as additional tens of thousands of administrators, and health, education, and food service providers. Especially in rural communities where other employment is scarce, corrections assumes huge economic im portance as a growth industry which provides stable jobs.
The punishment juggernaut of the Reagan-Bush years also spawned an array of private enterprises locked in a parasitic embrace with the state. From architectural firms and construction companies, to drug treatment and food service contractors, to prison industries, to the whole gamut of equipment and hardware suppliers-steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, uniforms, etc.-the business of imprisonment boasts a powerful assortment of well-or ganized and well-represented vested interests. Privatized prisons, then, are not a quantum leap toward dismantling the state but simply an extension of the already significant private sector involvement in corrections. The public-private symbiotic relationship was well-established long before 1984, when CCA first contracted with the INS to operate detention centers for illegal aliens. With private firms already providing everything from health care to drug treatment, the private management of entire prisons was a natural progression, especially given the tenor of the times.
Prison Prlvateers
The growing private prisons industry-several dozen companies contracting with state entities to provide and/or operate jails or prisons-is oligopolistic in structure. CCA and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation dominate the upper tier, control more than half the industry's operations, and run 29 minimum- and medium-security facilities with more than 10,000 beds. Beneath the big two is a tier of lesser players: a cluster of smaller regional companies, such as Kentucky-based U.S. Corrections Corporation and Nashville-based Pricor; and small corrections divisions of international concerns, including construction giant Bechtel Corporation. The boom has created a shadier realm of speculators ready to turn a quick profit from the traffic in convicts. Compared to the big three, these smaller companies are undercapitalized, inexperienced, understaffed, and are more likely to fail eventually. Run by hucksters, fast-talking developers, and snake-oil salesmen, they sell for-profit prisons-disguised as economic development-to depressed rural communities desperate to bolster their budgets and local economies. The pitch is simple: Prisons are overcrowded! Build a prison and the prisoners will come to you! You'll reap the benefits in terms of jobs and increased tax revenues! Reality is a bit more complex. Quirks in the federal tax codes remove exemptions for prison bonds if more than ten percent of prisoners are out-of-state, if state prison officials are reluctant to have their prisoners housed out-of-state, or if large cities with severe overcrowding are unwilling or unable to pay to transport local prisoners hundreds of miles. In short in the trade in convict bodies, supply and demand don't always match. Prisons built on a speculative basis are a risky venture-at least for the towns or counties involved; the speculators take their money off the top.
Wackenhut
Historically, this bottom tier has been the locus of most of the publicized problems and abuses. But although these bottom feeders attract "60 Minutes"-style scandal of banal corruption, it is in the top tiers that the most serious potential for abuse exists. Wackenhut, founded by former FBI of ficial George Wackenhut in 1954, is the largest and best known, as well as the oldest and most diversified. From its beginnings as a small, well-connected private security firm, Wackenhut has grown to a global security conglomerate with earnings of $630.3 million in 1992. Prison management is only the latest addition to its panoply of security and related services. When the Coral Gables, Florida-based firm first entered the prison business in 1987, it had one 250-bed INS detention
center. It now operates 11 facilities in five states housing nearly 5,500 prisoners. Wackenhut maintains two medium security prisons in Australia and boasts of "prospects for additional facilities in the U.S., South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.'' While some of its competitors in the private repression industry have specialized-Pinkerton and Burns, for example, lead the "rent-a-cop" field-Wackenhut tries to cover all the bases. Its 1991 revenues reflect its corporate diversity: The private security division contributed 43 per cent; the international division, 22 percent; airport security services, 15 percent; contracts to guard nuclear installations and Department of Energy facilities, 10 percent; and, last but not least, private corrections contributed 10 percent. Given the high rate of return in its corrections division-10 percent compared to 1.8 percent overall-Wackenhut has indicated that it wants to see that area grow.
Corrections Corporation of America
Its closest rival is CCA, which despite its youth and small size compared to the Wackenhut empire, has emerged as the pioneer and the industry leader. But unlike Wackenhut, CCA -like the second tier companies such as Pricor, U.S. Corrections, Concepts, Inc., and Correction Management Af filiates-is almost completely dependent on private imprisonment for its revenues. Founded in 1983 by the investors behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, CCA used the sales skills of Nashville banker/
financier Doctor R. Crants and the political connections of former Tennessee Republican Party chair Tom Beasley- co-founders of the company-to win early contracts. The next year, CCA cut its first big deals: to operate INS detention centers in Houston and Laredo, and to run the Silverdale Workhouse (Hamilton County prison farm) in its home state, Tennessee. In the next nine years, CCA grew steadily to become the industry leader, with 21 detention facilities hous ing more than 6,000 prisoners in six states, the U.K., and Australia. Its profits are up by nearly 50 percent from its 1991 end-of-the-year figures.
Pricor
Once number three behind CCA and Wackenhut, Pricor has taken a different tack from its competitors. It carved out a specialized niche within the private prison industry by convincing underused county jails in rural Texas that they could profit by accepting inmates from overcrowded national and statewide prisons. After cutting its corporate teeth on juvenile education and detention and halfway houses, expan sion into adult prisons must have seemed a natural step. In 1986, its first year of adult prison operations, Pricor opened minimum security detention facilities totaling 170 beds in Alabama and Virginia. By 1990, the company looked west to Texas, with its seemingly unending supply of prisoners and profits. Soon, it operated or had contracts pending for six 500-bed county "jails for hire," mainly in underbudgeted and underpopulated West Texas, and also with one 190-bed pre release center operated under contract with the Texas Department of Corrections. Although Pricor, fueled by its West Texas operations, posted fiscal 1991 revenues of more than $30 million for its adult corrections division, its Texas project was in shambles by mid-1992.
The Critiques ot Prison Prlvatlzatlon
Since the last round of prison privatization ended a century ago, a strong ethical and practical presumption has grown up that imprisonment should be solely a function of the state. The practical challenge centers around the material self interest of the various pro-privatization constituencies. There are two broad areas of concern: efficiency, i.e., can private operators be trusted to run prisons for less without sacrificing "quality of service"; and accountability, i.e., what oversight mechanisms will assure that society's interests come before those of the managing corporations. As to efficiency-leaving aside for a moment critical questions about what "efficiency" means in prison operations-three well-designed comparative studies found that private operators did run prisons more cheaply without sacrificing ''quality.'' Typically, the studies found, Wackenhut and CCA were able to provide cost savings of five to fifteen percent while still maintaining high marks for provision of services. Even in Texas, which has one of the lowest cost per prisoner rates, both Wackenhut and CCA came in cheaper. But what about "efficiency"? If the term means nothing more than the ability to house bodies cheaply while complying with minimal standards, then industry leaders, at least, appear to be efficient. Imprisonment, however, is generally acknowledged to include, at best, deterrence and rehabilita tion, or at least, reduction of recidivism rates. While there is no definitive private-public comparative study on recidivism, the private prisons, as opposed to the state, have a direct conflict of interest. By reducing the number of repeat offenders, they are in effect reducing the supply of profit producing "customers." It is in the material interest of these companies, therefore, to produce not prisoners who have "paid their debt to society," but ones who will continue to pay and pay on the installment plan. The question of accountability is a legal sinkhole. Under U.S. Iaw, the state is subject to constitutional restraints that do not apply to private entities. With prisoners' rights already under attack from Congress and the federal courts, and with ambiguous case law on private versus public liability, some legal scholars are worried. They fear that privatized prisons place inmates in a legal limbo-caught in a grey area between the state and the private sector-unable to hold either answerable for infringements of their constitutional rights. Another accountability issue concerns monitoring. The profit-motive could cause private operations to cut corners; leading to poor or unsafe conditions. Privatization proponents argue that regulation and careful state monitoring of compliance will sufficiently protect inmates, but that contention must come as cold comfort to prisoners who have already felt the tender mercies of the state. The record so far, however, shows that compared to the murderous outbreaks in state penitentiaries, incidents of violence, riot, escape and the like have been relatively rare in the private prisons. Direct comparisons are problematic, however, as CCA's Leaven worth facility opened in 1992, is the first, and so far only, private sector institution to handle maximum-security inmates as its primary function.
Doing Well Beats Dolng Good
Aside from practical issues of superficially defined performance, there is the fundamental ethical question involved in farming out the repressive functions of the state to private interests: Should we, as a society, shift responsibility for the ultimate sanction by which we measure normative behavior to those whose motive is profit? The deep philosophical issue is perhaps unanswerable, but the ramifications are disturbing.
Imagine a full-fledged corporate public relations campaign designed to whip up crime hysteria in order to increase profits.
The most worrisome aspect of prison privatization is the inevitable emergence of a private "prison lobby" concerned not with social welfare but with increasing its dividends, not with doing good, but with doing well. Sentencing guidelines, parole rules, corrections budgets, and new criminal legislation are areas in which private prison operators have a vested interest and could influence policy decisions. They could also benefit by manipulating public fear of crime. Unlike most other public policy arenas, criminal justice policy is largely determined not by the realities of crime but by its perception. That the fear of crime is exploited by politicians and "reality television" programming is a truism; but imagine a full-fledged corporate public relations campaign designed to whip up crime hysteria in order to increase profits.
"Prisons Are Built with Stones of Law..."
The practical arguments of prisoncrats and academics, as well as the more abstract philosophical and humanitarian objections of liberal critics, betray a certain myopic view of the problem and thus of its solutions. To accept the current parameters of debate within the criminal justice community is to beg some questions not only about the role of private enterprise in corrections, but also and more fundamentally, about the relationship between state and citizen (or alien) and the function of imprisonment in contemporary America. By any criteria for cost-benefit analysis, crime and corrections policy in the U.S. is a dismal failure. Prisons neither deter nor rehabilitate, nor do punishment variables seem to have any impact on crime. Granted, imprisonment does incapacitate and discipline offenders, but only while they remain behind bars-and only a minuscule minority of prisoners do not one day return to society. Prisons form a very narrow platform from which to alter behavior that is shaped by myriad factors, but these institutions, and the criminal justice system as a whole, are charged with precisely that task. Given the failure of corrections to achieve its stated goals, however, it is appropriate to ask whether imprisonment serves other, latent functions and what these functions might be. One role that imprisonment clearly fulfills is that of taking symbolic action against socially defined deviants. It seems to matter less that prisons stop crime than that they give the appearance of doing so--or of doing something. In a society unable or unwilling to address the fundamental social and economic causes of criminality, this symbolic action substitutes for substantive reform. Imprisonment also serves to demonstrate the disciplinary power of the state. In Michel Foucault's view, the prison is the model, the point of origin, for the entire model of social control that characterizes industrialized societies. Incarceration is at one end of a sliding scale of socially imposed surveillance and discipline. After two centuries of wide spread acceptance, its place on the continuum is distinguished mainly by the degree of day-to-day control and the physicality of its bars. The scale of control, in less extreme and visible form, however, extends throughout the institutions of society. As for the privatization of prisons, that industry, while a deeply disturbing phenomenon, is not the fundamental problem. Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities" created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality in the context of free-market supremacy. Dostoevsky once remarked that he measured the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. In the present case it may be as appropriate to judge us by their quantity, too. In either case, the judgment would be harsh indeed.
Private Prisons: Profits of Crime
-----------KEEP FREE MEDIA FREE-----------
Private Prisons: Profits of Crime
By Phil Smith
from the Fall 1993 issue of Covert Action Quarterly
Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital
to the "opportunities" created by society's
temper tantrum approach
to the problem of criminality.
At Leavenworth, Kansas, within a perimeter of razor wire, armed prison guards in uniform supervise hundreds of medium- and maximum-security federal prisoners. Welcome to one of America's growth industries- private sector, for-profit prisons. Here in the shadow of the federally-run Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) runs a short-term detention facility for medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Under contract to the U.S. Marshal's Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the CCA Leavenworth facility is not an anomaly but part of a trend. In the last decade, from juvenile detention centers to county jails and work farms to state prison units to INS holding camps for undocumented aliens, private interests have entered the incarceration business in a big way. Where there are people detained, there are profits to be made.
Imprisonment is an ugly business under any regime, but the prospect of a privatized prison system raises difficult and disturbing questions beyond those associated with a solely state-operated prison system. It has been, after all, a common assumption that the criminalization and punishment of certain behaviors-the deprivation of physical liberty and even of life itself-are not amenable to private sector usurpation. Some of the arguments that inform this assumption are ethi cal, some legal, and others practical, but all are being chal lenged by a growing group of special interests.
Illustration by Eric Drooker
Prisons for Profit
Surprisingly, private prisons are nothing new in U.S. history. In the mid-1800s, penny-pinching state legislatures awarded contracts to private entrepreneurs to operate and manage Louisiana's first state prison, New York's Auburn and Sing Sing penitentiaries, and others. These institutions became models for entire sections of the nation where privatized prisons were the norm later in the century. These prisons were supposed to turn a profit for the state, or at least pay for themselves. Typically, privatization was limited: The state leased or contracted convict labor to private companies. In some cases, such as Texas, however, the corrections function was turned over wholesale to private interests which prom ised to control delinquents at no cost to the state. As the system spread, labor and businesses complained that using unpaid convict labor constituted "unfair" competition. Of equal concern to reformers-but of less weight to politicians-was the issue of prisoner abuse under the private corrections regime. Anecdotal evidence from across the country painted a grim picture: While state officials remained indifferent or were bought off by private interests, prisoners suffered malnourishment, frequent whippings, overwork and overcrowding. A series of investigations of state prisons confirmed the tales of horror and produced public outrage. l As with anti-trust legislation and the progressive reforms which followed, public pressure impelled government regulation of private sector abuse. By the turn of the century, concerted opposition from labor, business, and reformers forced the state to take direct responsibility for prisons, thus bringing the first era of private prisons to an end.
Three Trends Converge
But as the twentieth century stumbles to an end, the hard lessons of a hundred years ago have been drowned out by the clamor of free market ideologues. Again, privatization is encroaching ever further on what had been state responsibilities, and prison systems are the target of private interests. The shift to privatization coalesced in the mid-1980s when three trends converged: The ideological imperatives of the free market; the huge increase in the number of prisoners; and the concomitant increase in imprisonment costs. In the giddy atmosphere of the Reagan years, the argument for the superiority of free enterprise resonated profoundly. Only the fire departments seemed safe, as everything from municipal garbage services to Third World state enterprises went on sale. Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. This assortment of entrepreneurs, free market ideologues, cash-strapped public officials, and academics promised design and management innovations without re- ducing costs or sacrificing "quality of service." In any case, they noted correctly, public sector corrections systems are in a state of chronic failure by any measure, and no other politically or economically feasible solution is on the table.
More Prisoners, More Money
This contemporary push to privatize corrections takes place against a socioeconomic background of severe and seemingly intractable crisis. Under the impetus of Reaganite social Darwinism, with its "toughness" on criminal offenders, pris on populations soared through the 1980s and into the 1990s, making the U.S. the unquestioned world leader in jailing its own populace. By 1990, 421 Americans out of every 100,000 were behind bars, easily outdistancing our closest competitors, South Africa and the then USSR. By 1992, the U.S. rate had climbed to 455. In human terms, the number of people in jails and prisons on any given day tops 1.2 million, up from fewer than 400,000 at the start of the Reagan era.
While incarceration statistics have skyrocketed, crime rates have increased much more slowly. In fact, from 1975 to 1985, the serious crime rate actually decreased by 1.42 per cent while the number of state and federal prisoners nearly doubled. The number of people sent to prison is actually determined by policy decisions and political expediency. Politicians of all stripes have sought cheap political points by being "tough on crime." They throw oil on the fire of public panic by portraying the urban underclass (read: young, black males) as predator. Ignoring the broad context of economic policies that have effectively abandoned large segments of the population, they have instituted mandatory minimum sentences, tighter or no parole schedules, and tougher "good time" regulations. Adding to the overpopulation these putative measures wrought, the War on Drugs-which aimed its frenzy at the inner city-stuffed the nation's already over crowded prisons with a large crop of mostly African-American and Latino nonviolent offenders. In state after state, budgets have been stretched to the breaking point by the cost of maintaining and expanding this massive correctional archipelago. In California, the nation's largest state prison system, the corrections budget increased seven-fold during the 1980s to $2.1 billion annually at the end of the decade-and the system was still operating at 180 percent of capacity. The huge costs associated with the choice to deal with social problems by mass imprisonment are a fundamental part of the drift toward private prisons. The converging trends (rampant free-marketism, higher prison population, and escalating costs) are part of a larger trend-the sharpening of Reaganite class war and the social meanness that accompanied it. The last time the U.S. faced such an influx of prisoners was after the Civil War when freed blacks, who were previously punished and controlled within the slave system, were sent to formerly all-white prisons. The present situation is not perfectly analogous, but once again, policy-makers faced with burgeoning and unruly minority resistance of their own making seem to have chosen a similar course: "Lock 'em up and throw away the key."
The Buslnes of Punishment
Punishment is not only a crucial and ever-larger state function, it is also big business. Private ownership and/or operation of prisons, while an increasingly significant part of the corrections system, represents only a fraction of the "prison-industrial complex." The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year. This figure does not address existing overcrowding, which is pandemic from city jails to federal prisons. The public sector imprisonment industry employs more than 50,000 guards, as well as additional tens of thousands of administrators, and health, education, and food service providers. Especially in rural communities where other employment is scarce, corrections assumes huge economic im portance as a growth industry which provides stable jobs.
The punishment juggernaut of the Reagan-Bush years also spawned an array of private enterprises locked in a parasitic embrace with the state. From architectural firms and construction companies, to drug treatment and food service contractors, to prison industries, to the whole gamut of equipment and hardware suppliers-steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, uniforms, etc.-the business of imprisonment boasts a powerful assortment of well-or ganized and well-represented vested interests. Privatized prisons, then, are not a quantum leap toward dismantling the state but simply an extension of the already significant private sector involvement in corrections. The public-private symbiotic relationship was well-established long before 1984, when CCA first contracted with the INS to operate detention centers for illegal aliens. With private firms already providing everything from health care to drug treatment, the private management of entire prisons was a natural progression, especially given the tenor of the times.
Prison Prlvateers
The growing private prisons industry-several dozen companies contracting with state entities to provide and/or operate jails or prisons-is oligopolistic in structure. CCA and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation dominate the upper tier, control more than half the industry's operations, and run 29 minimum- and medium-security facilities with more than 10,000 beds. Beneath the big two is a tier of lesser players: a cluster of smaller regional companies, such as Kentucky-based U.S. Corrections Corporation and Nashville-based Pricor; and small corrections divisions of international concerns, including construction giant Bechtel Corporation. The boom has created a shadier realm of speculators ready to turn a quick profit from the traffic in convicts. Compared to the big three, these smaller companies are undercapitalized, inexperienced, understaffed, and are more likely to fail eventually. Run by hucksters, fast-talking developers, and snake-oil salesmen, they sell for-profit prisons-disguised as economic development-to depressed rural communities desperate to bolster their budgets and local economies. The pitch is simple: Prisons are overcrowded! Build a prison and the prisoners will come to you! You'll reap the benefits in terms of jobs and increased tax revenues! Reality is a bit more complex. Quirks in the federal tax codes remove exemptions for prison bonds if more than ten percent of prisoners are out-of-state, if state prison officials are reluctant to have their prisoners housed out-of-state, or if large cities with severe overcrowding are unwilling or unable to pay to transport local prisoners hundreds of miles. In short in the trade in convict bodies, supply and demand don't always match. Prisons built on a speculative basis are a risky venture-at least for the towns or counties involved; the speculators take their money off the top.
Wackenhut
Historically, this bottom tier has been the locus of most of the publicized problems and abuses. But although these bottom feeders attract "60 Minutes"-style scandal of banal corruption, it is in the top tiers that the most serious potential for abuse exists. Wackenhut, founded by former FBI of ficial George Wackenhut in 1954, is the largest and best known, as well as the oldest and most diversified. From its beginnings as a small, well-connected private security firm, Wackenhut has grown to a global security conglomerate with earnings of $630.3 million in 1992. Prison management is only the latest addition to its panoply of security and related services. When the Coral Gables, Florida-based firm first entered the prison business in 1987, it had one 250-bed INS detention
center. It now operates 11 facilities in five states housing nearly 5,500 prisoners. Wackenhut maintains two medium security prisons in Australia and boasts of "prospects for additional facilities in the U.S., South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.'' While some of its competitors in the private repression industry have specialized-Pinkerton and Burns, for example, lead the "rent-a-cop" field-Wackenhut tries to cover all the bases. Its 1991 revenues reflect its corporate diversity: The private security division contributed 43 per cent; the international division, 22 percent; airport security services, 15 percent; contracts to guard nuclear installations and Department of Energy facilities, 10 percent; and, last but not least, private corrections contributed 10 percent. Given the high rate of return in its corrections division-10 percent compared to 1.8 percent overall-Wackenhut has indicated that it wants to see that area grow.
Corrections Corporation of America
Its closest rival is CCA, which despite its youth and small size compared to the Wackenhut empire, has emerged as the pioneer and the industry leader. But unlike Wackenhut, CCA -like the second tier companies such as Pricor, U.S. Corrections, Concepts, Inc., and Correction Management Af filiates-is almost completely dependent on private imprisonment for its revenues. Founded in 1983 by the investors behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, CCA used the sales skills of Nashville banker/
financier Doctor R. Crants and the political connections of former Tennessee Republican Party chair Tom Beasley- co-founders of the company-to win early contracts. The next year, CCA cut its first big deals: to operate INS detention centers in Houston and Laredo, and to run the Silverdale Workhouse (Hamilton County prison farm) in its home state, Tennessee. In the next nine years, CCA grew steadily to become the industry leader, with 21 detention facilities hous ing more than 6,000 prisoners in six states, the U.K., and Australia. Its profits are up by nearly 50 percent from its 1991 end-of-the-year figures.
Pricor
Once number three behind CCA and Wackenhut, Pricor has taken a different tack from its competitors. It carved out a specialized niche within the private prison industry by convincing underused county jails in rural Texas that they could profit by accepting inmates from overcrowded national and statewide prisons. After cutting its corporate teeth on juvenile education and detention and halfway houses, expan sion into adult prisons must have seemed a natural step. In 1986, its first year of adult prison operations, Pricor opened minimum security detention facilities totaling 170 beds in Alabama and Virginia. By 1990, the company looked west to Texas, with its seemingly unending supply of prisoners and profits. Soon, it operated or had contracts pending for six 500-bed county "jails for hire," mainly in underbudgeted and underpopulated West Texas, and also with one 190-bed pre release center operated under contract with the Texas Department of Corrections. Although Pricor, fueled by its West Texas operations, posted fiscal 1991 revenues of more than $30 million for its adult corrections division, its Texas project was in shambles by mid-1992.
The Critiques ot Prison Prlvatlzatlon
Since the last round of prison privatization ended a century ago, a strong ethical and practical presumption has grown up that imprisonment should be solely a function of the state. The practical challenge centers around the material self interest of the various pro-privatization constituencies. There are two broad areas of concern: efficiency, i.e., can private operators be trusted to run prisons for less without sacrificing "quality of service"; and accountability, i.e., what oversight mechanisms will assure that society's interests come before those of the managing corporations. As to efficiency-leaving aside for a moment critical questions about what "efficiency" means in prison operations-three well-designed comparative studies found that private operators did run prisons more cheaply without sacrificing ''quality.'' Typically, the studies found, Wackenhut and CCA were able to provide cost savings of five to fifteen percent while still maintaining high marks for provision of services. Even in Texas, which has one of the lowest cost per prisoner rates, both Wackenhut and CCA came in cheaper. But what about "efficiency"? If the term means nothing more than the ability to house bodies cheaply while complying with minimal standards, then industry leaders, at least, appear to be efficient. Imprisonment, however, is generally acknowledged to include, at best, deterrence and rehabilita tion, or at least, reduction of recidivism rates. While there is no definitive private-public comparative study on recidivism, the private prisons, as opposed to the state, have a direct conflict of interest. By reducing the number of repeat offenders, they are in effect reducing the supply of profit producing "customers." It is in the material interest of these companies, therefore, to produce not prisoners who have "paid their debt to society," but ones who will continue to pay and pay on the installment plan. The question of accountability is a legal sinkhole. Under U.S. Iaw, the state is subject to constitutional restraints that do not apply to private entities. With prisoners' rights already under attack from Congress and the federal courts, and with ambiguous case law on private versus public liability, some legal scholars are worried. They fear that privatized prisons place inmates in a legal limbo-caught in a grey area between the state and the private sector-unable to hold either answerable for infringements of their constitutional rights. Another accountability issue concerns monitoring. The profit-motive could cause private operations to cut corners; leading to poor or unsafe conditions. Privatization proponents argue that regulation and careful state monitoring of compliance will sufficiently protect inmates, but that contention must come as cold comfort to prisoners who have already felt the tender mercies of the state. The record so far, however, shows that compared to the murderous outbreaks in state penitentiaries, incidents of violence, riot, escape and the like have been relatively rare in the private prisons. Direct comparisons are problematic, however, as CCA's Leaven worth facility opened in 1992, is the first, and so far only, private sector institution to handle maximum-security inmates as its primary function.
Doing Well Beats Dolng Good
Aside from practical issues of superficially defined performance, there is the fundamental ethical question involved in farming out the repressive functions of the state to private interests: Should we, as a society, shift responsibility for the ultimate sanction by which we measure normative behavior to those whose motive is profit? The deep philosophical issue is perhaps unanswerable, but the ramifications are disturbing.
Imagine a full-fledged corporate
public relations campaign designed to
whip up crime hysteria in order to
increase profits.
The most worrisome aspect of prison privatization is the inevitable emergence of a private "prison lobby" concerned not with social welfare but with increasing its dividends, not with doing good, but with doing well. Sentencing guidelines, parole rules, corrections budgets, and new criminal legislation are areas in which private prison operators have a vested interest and could influence policy decisions. They could also benefit by manipulating public fear of crime. Unlike most other public policy arenas, criminal justice policy is largely determined not by the realities of crime but by its perception. That the fear of crime is exploited by politicians and "reality television" programming is a truism; but imagine a full-fledged corporate public relations campaign designed to whip up crime hysteria in order to increase profits.
"Prisons Are Built with Stones of Law..."
The practical arguments of prisoncrats and academics, as well as the more abstract philosophical and humanitarian objections of liberal critics, betray a certain myopic view of the problem and thus of its solutions. To accept the current parameters of debate within the criminal justice community is to beg some questions not only about the role of private enterprise in corrections, but also and more fundamentally, about the relationship between state and citizen (or alien) and the function of imprisonment in contemporary America. By any criteria for cost-benefit analysis, crime and corrections policy in the U.S. is a dismal failure. Prisons neither deter nor rehabilitate, nor do punishment variables seem to have any impact on crime. Granted, imprisonment does incapacitate and discipline offenders, but only while they remain behind bars-and only a minuscule minority of prisoners do not one day return to society. Prisons form a very narrow platform from which to alter behavior that is shaped by myriad factors, but these institutions, and the criminal justice system as a whole, are charged with precisely that task. Given the failure of corrections to achieve its stated goals, however, it is appropriate to ask whether imprisonment serves other, latent functions and what these functions might be. One role that imprisonment clearly fulfills is that of taking symbolic action against socially defined deviants. It seems to matter less that prisons stop crime than that they give the appearance of doing so--or of doing something. In a society unable or unwilling to address the fundamental social and economic causes of criminality, this symbolic action substitutes for substantive reform. Imprisonment also serves to demonstrate the disciplinary power of the state. In Michel Foucault's view, the prison is the model, the point of origin, for the entire model of social control that characterizes industrialized societies. Incarceration is at one end of a sliding scale of socially imposed surveillance and discipline. After two centuries of wide spread acceptance, its place on the continuum is distinguished mainly by the degree of day-to-day control and the physicality of its bars. The scale of control, in less extreme and visible form, however, extends throughout the institutions of society. As for the privatization of prisons, that industry, while a deeply disturbing phenomenon, is not the fundamental problem. Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities" created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality in the context of free-market supremacy. Dostoevsky once remarked that he measured the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. In the present case it may be as appropriate to judge us by their quantity, too. In either case, the judgment would be harsh indeed.
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Life, Death, and the Beyond - Noesis Mega Society Journal
Life, Death, and the Beyond
The following is an article by Cedric Stratton from March 2008 Issue 186 Noesis - The Journal of the Mega Society. the Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence credibly claimed to be able to discriminate at that level.
Do you believe in God/Supreme Being/Uncaused Cause?
No, I do not believe in a supreme being. My rationale is entrenched in chaos theory. By carefully observing and analyzing the random interactions of large numbers of moving things, we can discern within the apparent chaos many ordered zones persisting for finite, measurable, periods.
Logical extension implies that an infinite universe, in time, will display every degree of order within that chaos, albeit surrounded by an overwhelming mass of material in disarray.
Given the magnitude of time, space, and circumstance, the geneses of galaxies, stars, planets and life do not require intervention by a superior being. I suspect that people studying the infinite variety afforded by the Mandelbrot set, or similar fractal systems, likely incline towards this, or a similar, point of view. With the infinite, all things are Given the magnitude of time, space, and circumstance, the geneses of galaxies, stars, planets and life do not require intervention by a superior being. I suspect that people studying the infinite variety afforded by the Mandelbrot set, or similar fractal systems, likely incline towards this, or a similar, point of view. With the infinite, all things are possible hence the spacetime infinity is sufficient unto itself.
Over geological time spans there are eras where an order exists with a few materials remaining stable for long periods. Again, over cosmic time, the current geological group of substances may have several forms; one stable set of substances changes to other stable substances, while others resist changes. Some of the unchanged persist; some of the new persist.
Human lives, on the scale of geologic and cosmic time are not even a blip on the radar of events. 100,000 years of humanoids in an estimated 10,000,000,000 years of existence of the Milky Way galaxy come to a trifling 0.0001%. The presence of ordered zones in a chaotic system imply that pockets of order come and go within the infinity of time and
space, and we (humans, the biosphere, the whole planet) happen to be in one at present.
If he exists, does he care about us?
This is moot, given my answer to the first part. If a being exists who ‘made us in his image’ then, regarding the time when dinosaurs were dominant, before humanoids even existed, I ask ‘in whose image were the dinosaurs made?’ Then again, at some time in the future when humans no longer walk the earth (or any other place), and a new prevailing life form replaces the human domain, in whose image would they be made—in the image of the same god, or a different one? If the same god, he has ceased to care about us; if a different god, the original was not immortal, invisible, etc.
Put differently, why should a being with the ability to exist in all places at once, make all things, do all things (according to one popular concept of god), pause along the way to care for each and every individual creature? When earth changes in a way to render human life impossible, and other life forms have their opportunity for a moment in the sun, the view of a caring god implies that the god must therefore Put differently, why should a being with the ability to exist in all places at once, make all things, do all things (according to one popular concept of god), pause along the way to care for each and every individual creature? When earth changes in a way to render human life impossible, and other life forms have their opportunity for a moment in the sun, the view of a caring god implies that the god must therefore have ceased to care for humans, in favor of the latest viable species.
2. Is life as we know it, the BEALLENDALL?
I have no problem with saying ‘yes’ to that one.
Do we just decompose body and spirit at death?
Undoubtedly. Again, I have no problem with ‘yes’ to that one either.
What happens to our consciousness/spirit/soul when we die?
I already sense an answer to this one – this time by answering a converse question: ‘where was our consciousness/spirit/soul before we were born (or conceived, according to one's view of when life begins)?’ My view is that we have already experienced the ‘hereafter’in its alter ego, the ‘herebefore’. Our recollection of it is zero, despite Shirley MacLaine’s claims. It seems logical that any consciousness/spirit/soul we had in the ‘beforelife’ should revert to the same form in the ‘afterlife’.
Why should its past form be different than the future form? Materially, our individual lives, during the organizing and reorganizing matter from nonliving to living and back again, are way stations in the matter of which we are made. Our bones will become the differently organized mineral calcium phosphate, our protein will be reshared with other life forms, and our blood salts will merge with sea salt. Body and soul are one.
My view of the living spirit/soul hinges on the notion that life goes inexorably onwards and upwards. Of the two choices, one granting ‘advantage’ and prolonged life (order), and the other, ‘disadvantage’ and curtailed life (early return to disorder), the path to ‘advantage’ bestows representational rights in following generations. ‘Choice’ seems to follow more closely the gift of self locomotion.
Plants, not having that gift, thrive where they may. They change within their lives only by adaptation, and in their progeny, by mutation. But motile organisms making good choices will survive, when similar ones making bad choices will not survive, hastening change. Self propelled organisms share this ‘choosing’ ability, which I judge is the seat of consciousness.
The humblest motile organism I know of that exhibits ‘choice’ is a tiny oceanic organism. Perhaps many species do this, but one example is all we need to make the point. This organism ‘dances’ using minute flagellae around its body, and the dance varies according to the wavelength of the light in which it is bathed. The two kinds of dance are described as the ‘blue’ dance and the ‘red’ dance.
It is zooplanktonic, and feeds on bluegreen algae floating in the ocean, almost at the surface. Wind action drives the algae into ‘windrows’, long lines at the sea’s surface, to become plantfood for this small herbivore. The algae use part of the light shining on them to sustain growth, and the light below them is changed accordingly. When the flagellate creature is amid the algae it feeds on, it ‘sees’ the remaining color, which lacks blue/green components, appearing reddish, and performs a vertical oscillating dance. As long as it is feeding the dance It is zooplanktonic, and feeds on bluegreen algae floating in the ocean, almost at the surface. Wind action drives the algae into ‘windrows’, long lines at the sea’s surface, to become plantfood for this small herbivore. The algae use part of the light shining on them to sustain growth, and the light below them is changed accordingly. When the flagellate creature is amid the algae it feeds on, it ‘sees’ the remaining color, which lacks blue/green components, appearing reddish, and performs a vertical oscillating dance. As long as it is feeding the dance places it at different vertical stations within the windrow.
When the same flagellate is out in the open between windrows, it ‘sees’ a different color with more blue in the light spectrum, because the algae is not there to absorb the blue/green light component. Then the organism dances laterally, side to side. Sooner or later the dance brings it to a new windrow, and the pattern reverts to vertical oscillation, maintaining its position to benefit from the ‘choice’ so made.
If organisms follow no pattern, they suffer a feeding disadvantage. ‘Choice’ propelled the evolution of this organism towards more efficient versions of the original. I hope nobody out there reading this contends that evolution is ‘only a theory’.
I see ‘consciousness’ in more complex organisms (i.e., the higher animals), as an enormously multifaceted complex of many such ‘choices’, some more important than others. The more important ‘choices’ override the less important.
Some choices are conscious, some are embedded in the nervous system, but they still represent a ‘choice’—like when you instinctively withdraw the hand from a hot surface. Breathing is unconscious, but drinking is a conscious choice—we can have water or wine now—or we may choose to wait a little longer until the tea has brewed. When the body dies, choices no longer have consequences, so there is no further need for the spirit/soul. I contend the soul is not eternal, and is not recycled. I utterly discount Shirley MacLaine’s claims to previous lives. Because she is famous and has money, most people forget that she made it by playing very convincing ‘let’s pretend’ at the highest professional levels.
3. Granted a historic Christ, what do you believe about him?
Various authorities inform us that there were numerous Christs, the biblical one and many pretenders, which included a few genuine, earnest emulators.
My answers refer to the biblical one, scourged and crucified by the Romans, in the event instigated by local civic leaders in Jerusalem in Judaea.
He was the subject of many idealized life stories, of which just four were chosen for that great piece of literature, The Bible. These stories stretch credulity far beyond breaking. Walking on water? Turning water into wine? Rising from the dead? Who are we kidding? If the ‘wine’ miracle happened, were the usual laws of matter fleetingly revoked? Material laws yield to none, even temporarily.
How did it happen? Perhaps Jesus read the character of a rascally steward who stashed away the good stuff for his own later use, and when confronted by Jesus, he was obliged to fetch it back out. Doubting Thomas? Never happened. Jesus was either dead and did not reappear to the apostles, or he was not dead and appeared as an injured self who recovered—certainly not resurrected after having been dead.
Did anyone read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary?
However, from the several accounts of Christ’s life (all different, often in major details), one can tease out a core of the man’s reality. Undoubtedly he was a man with great charisma, deep love and concern for his fellow men, especially the downtrodden; sensitivity to social injustice; a compelling orator; wellversed in Mosaic law; and he held a deepseated disdain for the pomp and hypocrisy of the ‘powersthatbe’— the Pharisees and scribes, the moneylenders, the rich men, the rulers, all filled with their own importance, and most of them on the take.
He was the object of their deadly conspiracy because his charisma and popular following threatened their social order, and their position in it—similar to the way many southern whites felt threatened by Martin Luther King, Jr. during the early days of my residence within these shores. Were a Jesus Christ born today, I believe he would hold precisely the same attitudes and values as the original Christ, with minor modifications to suit the present day context.
I already described my view of the gospels—how the extant Greek and Roman god stories described many deities (and demons, too) with miraculous powers, among others, the ability to procreate with humans to produce demigods, and so on. The gospel makers wrote of Jesus’ goodness, love, forgiveness and tolerance as best they could, but I think they were tempted in the end to beef up his godliness by including miracles, so as to compare better with the other god literatures—curiously, the exact temptation that Christ was recorded as having resisted. So—no biblical style miracles. I do believe in miracles, but of chance or the inner spirit.
Common sense says miracles never overturn the laws of physics, chemistry and mathematics. . . . Having said that, comparing the Christian gospels with Roman and Greek god writings, I find the gospel stories commendably far more rational and sober, and the better for it—but they still overtax credulity. There are two views, maybe more, of the resurrection.
Either people saw another man with similar love and kindness towards his fellows, and metaphorically said‘he is the Christ’, in the same the way people seeing me for the first time as an adult, say ‘goodness me, it is Stanley (my dad’s name) all over again!’ Or it is a wishful account Either people saw another man with similar love and kindness towards his fellows, and metaphorically said‘he is the Christ’, in the same the way people seeing me for the first time as an adult, say ‘goodness me, it is Stanley (my dad’s name) all over again!’ Or it is a wishful account of what should have been, were justice served—an attempt to
reverse time, as if to deny Christ’s tragic last day—even after Christ showed a guilty adulteress a mercy, that he, an innocent, was denied. In that era women were stoned for adultery, and babies slaughtered on a seer’s prediction. That should not have been, but it was. Was he God, man, or both?
From various readings on how the brain works, I gather that there is a basic human need for a ‘higher being’. This need has been met many times in many cultures, so that basically ‘man made God in his own image’—not the other way round.
The god concept may be used for purposes noble or evil but is a human artifact. Most who follow a god do so for noble purposes, to gain inner strength and will, to better accept the adversities of life, and to help improve the lots of those less fortunate. To me, with no god necessary for life to exist, and no evidence of a physically real god, the one Christ was undoubtedly a man, a very extraordinary man, but still—a man.
In other writings I have suggested that there might be some benefit for believers if Jesus were seen as a man purely and simply. ‘Jesus as god’ offers no hope for the ordinary person to adopt Jesus’ loving and forgiving attitudes, and might cause one to complain ‘why bother? I am just a man, he was a god.’
But ‘Jesus as human’ permits a more optimistic attitude—‘If Jesus can, then I can too.
Although I am sure he was not a god, I can accept reference to him as ‘god’ metaphorically. This, by the way, is one reason why I attend a Lutheran church regularly.
Although I am an atheist, I feel Christian in everything except the theological component. I regard the communion rite as a reenactment of the poignant events and remarks surrounding Jesus’ last hours, at a time when he surely was aware of the nature and extent of the authorities’ conspiracy against him, and probably also realized the certainty that he would die because of it. If it takes a communion rite to remind people to behave with love and decency towards each other, I am happy with it, but I do not feel I need that reminder.
While the rest of the congregation partakes of the ritual at the altar rail, I commune alone in the choir stalls, singing vocal soli of one or other of the lovely pieces written especially for communion—pure theatre on my part, but church members often say that it stirs them.
4. What do you see as the purpose(s) in our lives.
Does there have to be a purpose? I always question, and in the questioning mode a word I frequently use is ‘why’? Why do we need a purpose? What happens if we simply ‘get on with it’? In seeking answers I try to disassociate by looking beyond the human species. It seems to help me focus objectively on the logic, by removing the subjectivity involved because of my status as a human. Thus I imagine, say, an anthill, and being uninvolved, I can answer in a more objective way ‘what do ants suppose is their purpose in life?’ The answer I keep reaching (outside the ecological ‘balanceofnature’concept) is: individual ants have no
purpose, they just ARE.
In the material scheme of things our lives, our world, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe, are all driven by thermodynamics. Objects exposed to energy, no matter the type or origin, respond by intercepting it or allowing it to pass. Intercepted energy begets change. The change is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in character, since ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are purely human constructs, and wholly subjective.
Absorption of energy always causes low energy substances to assume a higher energy. The change may be fleeting (briefly heated); or durable (they become other stable substances); or durable decomposition substances (the gaseous parts disperse, and the material is no more the same thing); the energy may be reemitted soon afterwards with reversion to the original state; or long afterwards by another agency’s intervention; or remain ‘locked’ in the higher energy state, as in gases formed by decomposition. Thus sunlight changes carbon dioxide and water into green plants, glucose, cellulose, and oxygen, and a gamut of other materials in the
process.
Glucose and oxygen are high energy substances, and of them we say that the plant producing them has stored the energy from the sun. We can release that energy metabolically to perform biological work, or we can release it chemically to do mechanical work—for instance, by burning the wood to drive a steam engine.
While we still have much to learn about the details of our cosmos, nothing out there suggests we will ever have to change the basic laws governing energy and matter, although we may make modifications as new conditions impose boundaries for existing laws. For example, I see us discovering laws to apply under different conditions than at the earth’s surface, e.g., in the intense gravitational field near a ‘black hole’, but never actually overturning Newton’s laws of motion. To me, life processes, geologic processes, cosmic processes, all are just thermodynamics
at work.
Our role in the universe is a small feature of the energy balance as it passes from source to receptor—each receptor being source to the next receptor in line, and so on.
To me it all comes together as an elegant whole—nothing
wasted, only changed. Furthermore, no matter how slow it seems on our timescale, the changes are quite fast enough on the geological or cosmic scale.
5. The problem of evil in the world/tragedies caused by nature and man—how do you explain it?
Again I ask—‘do we need explanations?’ When I taught oceanography, I used a small book by Willard Bascom, Waves and Beaches, to describe wave motions and their effects. Bascom was an engineer, who went everywhere, did everything.
He illustrated his chapter on tsunamis with a photograph of the harbor at Honolulu taken by a photographer from a safe vantage point several hundred feet above the impending danger, seconds before a several hundredfoot wave crashed into the docking basin. This towering wave commanded the entire picture, but in the picture was one small corner of one wharf not yet inundated, but in a few seconds it would be. On the wharf was the lone figure of a longshoreman trapped by circumstance or carelessness, frantically trying to flee—to where?—there was nowhere for him to go—a ‘chance’ of location.
In the same occupation in New York, Liverpool, or Marseilles, his life might have offered different, better, chances. The caption went something like—‘to the left center of the picture an unlucky longshoreman tries to escape the impending disaster’. His unfortunate end was a mere matter of chance. I suppose we could call this the quantum of tragedy—one man losing his life before his time in a vain fight against nature (in this case). It could just as well have been in a vain fight against the spiteful caprices of mankind in one of our many wars.
If we multiply this one death by a hundred, a thousand, a million, is it any more of a tragedy? I do not consider it so.
The degree of tragedy for each individual death, in the eyes of those survivors closest to the deceased, is precisely the same in every case. The only difference in the cases lies in the number scale we use to measure things. The ending of life occurs to all of us, some sooner, some later.
I think most people tend to agree that the defining feature of ‘tragedy’ is an untimely or needless death, snatched away from life into oblivion from the midst of a healthy, productive, joyous life. But is it more of a tragedy when 270 people are killed in one airline disaster rather than one driver dying in a car accident—or less, when 30,000 people annually die separate deaths in motor accidents? The scale may be I think most people tend to agree that the defining feature of ‘tragedy’ is an untimely or needless death, snatched away from life into oblivion from the midst of a healthy, productive, joyous life. But is it more of a tragedy when 270 people are killed in one airline disaster rather than one driver dying in a car accident—or less, when 30,000 people annually die separate deaths in motor accidents? The scale may be different, but the individual intensity and experience is the same.
Humans are privileged to an extent found nowhere else in nature. Humans jealously count, and account for, each and every human life, documenting it from beginning to end—or we try to, anyway. But in the rest of nature, a different system operates. A typical small female bird lives ten years, and nests at least once a year after her first year. Here in the southeastern United States, many nest in both spring and fall. They typically lay up to eight eggs each mating season. If undisturbed, perhaps eighty percent will hatch. If the nestlings mature, in one year, they are capable of doing the same thing. One successful adult female bird could theoretically generate billions of offspring in her lifetime. But with mortality and predation being what they are, most adult females Humans are privileged to an extent found nowhere else in nature. Humans jealously count, and account for, each and every human life, documenting it from beginning to end—or we try to, anyway. But in the rest of nature, a different system operates. A typical small female bird lives ten years, and nests at least once a year after her first year. Here in the southeastern United States, many nest in both spring and fall. They typically lay up to eight eggs each mating season. If undisturbed, perhaps eighty percent will hatch. If the nestlings mature, in one year, they are capable of doing the same thing. One successful adult female bird could theoretically generate billions of offspring in her lifetime. But with mortality and predation being what they are, most adult females are lucky if, during a whole life, more than a few offspring survive.
In the African veldt gnus are prey for lions, the Tommies (Thompson’s gazelles) are prey for almost all the lesser predators. When each one dies, life goes on. The animals culled by predation are most usually the sick, the old, or the young who cannot keep up, or those lacking sufficient experience to do what is needed to continue the competition. But through it all, although more young die than survive, many young do survive to maturity, promising continuity. I think the human penchant for documentation of every human life is what drives the supposition that a god would show the same concern for details of every life—from In the African veldt gnus are prey for lions, the Tommies (Thompson’s gazelles) are prey for almost all the lesser predators. When each one dies, life goes on. The animals culled by predation are most usually the sick, the old, or the young who cannot keep up, or those lacking sufficient experience to do what is needed to continue the competition. But through it all, although more young die than survive, many young do survive to maturity, promising continuity. I think the human penchant for documentation of every human life is what drives the supposition that a god would show the same concern for details of every life—from humans to the fallen sparrow, the lilies of the field, and so on.
In my opinion, individual survival is just a matter of chance, often helped by the actions of an aggressively watchful parent. Extending simple chance from the animal kingdom to the human realm, I see no reason to step outside the laws of chance (in some cases chance alone, in others chance coupled with poor life choices). One person comes down with a fatal disease and dies young, while a neighbor exposed to the same conditions does not.
One with a heritable weakness of the lungs chooses to smoke, while his son chooses not to (my dad and I). One person traveling to the same office, over the same highway, for the same daily mileage as his peers, is killed in a car accident, while hundreds of his colleagues traveling the same roads live their entire lives with no such deadly mischance. Sad to see, when it happens, devastating for the immediate family, but mere chance nonetheless.
There is better authority than mine to say that god has no hand in survival, if chance is a sufficient explanation. According to philosopher theologian William of Ockham, (Ockham’s Razor), the best explanation for an observed phenomenon is the simplest—meaning: do not impute complexity beyond the minimum that accounts for what you see. If, There is better authority than mine to say that god has no hand in survival, if chance is a sufficient explanation. According to philosopher theologian William of Ockham, (Ockham’s Razor), the best explanation for an observed phenomenon is the simplest—meaning: do not impute complexity beyond the minimum that accounts for what you see. If, later, some new aspect of the phenomenon appears, one is not
necessarily back at square one. A modification or addition to the original explanation, or defining boundary conditions, is often all that is needed.
Aside: Most creation theorists say that the theory of evolution is ‘only a theory’, and has been ‘disproved’ so many times it cannot be true. They ignore mountains of evidence supporting evolution, not the least of which is the accelerated selective evolution of food crops and farm animals within the short span of human history.
The theory of evolution has not been ‘disproved’, just modified bitbybit to accommodate details unknown in Darwin’s time. Just as changing the value of ‘pi’ as we learn better how to find it more accurately does not disprove its value—so changes in Darwin’s theory do not deny the original, just add richness of detail. Its basis has never been changed or seriously challenged, yet creationists keep trying to replace it by a different theory that has no supporting evidence and cannot be tested. They threaten a return to the scientific stone age, as they try to claim The theory of evolution has not been ‘disproved’, just modified bitbybit to accommodate details unknown in Darwin’s time. Just as changing the value of ‘pi’ as we learn better how to find it more accurately does not disprove its value—so changes in Darwin’s theory do not deny the original, just add richness of detail. Its basis has never been changed or seriously challenged, yet creationists keep trying to replace it by a different theory that has no supporting evidence and cannot be tested. They threaten a return to the scientific stone age, as they try to claim authority that they want, but do not deserve.
Not one reputable scientist backs creationist theory over Darwin’s theory. However, creation theorists are often able to buy opinions of even PhD biologists who will write papers to support any theory, if only it brings them grant money—a degrading outcome of the ‘publish or perish’ policy. The US public education system has become the laughing stock of the scientific world by putting creation theory (with its absence of valid supporting data), in science curricula, on the same footing as Darwin’s basic hypothesis (with its wealth of testable supporting evidence).
Back to the main drift: god is an unnecessarily complex explanation for what goes on around us whereas, in contrast, chance is simple, elegant, and sufficient. That, plus there already exists a mathematically sound basis for most observations about ‘chance’, that permit predictions, not of individual outcomes, but of overall outcomes—a sort of quantum theory of living objects.
Incidentally, Ockham was a major instrument in showing that the writings and sermons of Pope John XXII contained serious errors of logic, amounting to heresy. That pope was eventually dethroned, but the surrounding controversy led to Ockham’s excommunication—like he cared, when it was over. He devoted the rest of his life to deep aspects of logic. That Pope was the reason why it took so long for another to come along and adopt John XXIII as his papal moniker.
I regard as my philosophical progenitors, Kant, Hegel, Huxley (Julian, not Thomas, his father, nor Aldous, his brother), and Russell, to name a few. I have not read all of their works, just enough to recognize that we are all on the same map traveling the same roads. I was privileged to hear Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell once a week for a long period of time when they ran the BBC panel program The Brains Trust with I regard as my philosophical progenitors, Kant, Hegel, Huxley (Julian, not Thomas, his father, nor Aldous, his brother), and Russell, to name a few. I have not read all of their works, just enough to recognize that we are all on the same map traveling the same roads. I was privileged to hear Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell once a week for a long period of time when they ran the BBC panel program The Brains Trust with discussions of such topics as this, a seminal experience.
I feel most kinship with Bertrand Russell. You might say he was my intellectual progenitor, especially since he was alive, well and extremely intellectually productive during my lifetime.
I cannot consider myself his intellectual equal, although had I been born with a golden spoon in my mouth, who knows? After all, he was Viscount Russell of Amberley, the third Earl Russell of Kingston, with a brilliant mind to boot, and I was not most of those things, perhaps not any.
However, he and I share a passion for mathematics, beautiful women, a heretical degree of skepticism, and a reliance on the evidence of the senses, extended as possible by tools to measure and detect things for which our given senses are inadequate, all coupled with logic used to the best of our ability.
People You'll Find at a Geek Convention
10. The "Satire Web Site Guy Who Walks Around Looking Confused, Hoping Someone Will Stop To Help Him Then Recognize Him and Say 'I Love Your Site,' But It Never Happens" guy
9. The "Hoping that His Costume Will Make Him an Internet Meme" guy
8. The "Blogging this to a Blog that Nobody Reads" guy
7. The "Overestimated How Many Red Bulls He Could Drink" guy
6. The "Thinks He Knows More than the Expert Panelists, but Makes the Audience Groan with His Inane Questions" guy
5. Wil Wheaton
4. The "I'm Never Doing This Again for Him" girl
3. Disappointed hookers
2. The "Smuggling a Bat'leth in His Pants" guy (a least I hope that's a bat'leth)
1. The "Instructed Under Penalty of Dismissal to Greet Everyone at the ConSuite Door with the Phrase 'None shall pass!'" guy