Murder on Broad Street, Middletown

A Wesleyan junior was murdered on the street where my daughter goes to school.
How often have we seen a single impulsive act born of anger bring lifetimes of suffering? There is a sickness in our culture that turns heart-sick men into monsters.My daughter's school walked by this place on the way to the Y minutes before this happened. My wife was called to pick her up at the Y when the return route was blocked by a police perimeter. She was told a bad crime had taken place, and she asked "Was something stolen?" When she was told no,she asked "Was someone killed?" How will this eight-year-old feel next week when she walks past this place? And when she is eighteen, I will worry for her safety at the hands of some young man too blind with passion to know what it is to truly love a woman.
Somehow we must teach our young men the horror and destruction that will follow should they lose faith in the goodness of life in the face of emotional pain from life's many disappointments. We need to build circuit breakers into their thought process so that they never choose to destroy what they can not possess. That is the difference between seeing a woman as an object of desire and truly caring for her.

Mid Winter's Dream

There is something incredibly soothing about snow falling on a busy day. Cars slow, and the world pauses to watch a new coat of white paint dry. Familiar landmarks are subdued as a dreamscape descends and buries not just the surface, but thoughts of the day, as well.
I do not think the the same way when I am watching the snow fill the air and cover the ground. It is as though the old world has come to an end, blanketed by a fine linen sheet drawn gently across the face of a recently expired patient. For a while time is frozen by the relentless piling of powder.
Old songs on the radio play like new. Worries and memories disappear in the face of the ancient threat of wind and cold tamed by a car heater set on hi. Driving through the cloud of flakes, the traffic proceeds slowly, carefully, red lights blazing a trail to the horizon until they disappear into a point. Brake lights call out in warning of ice on the road ahead.. The danger claims me from the cloud and I grip the wheel tight, ready to turn away from whatever might hurl itself in my way. Once past the frozen bridge the tail lights line up two y two and march into infinity bliss. My ride has cut a ribbon through heaven, but it closes behind me as soon as I pass. My ride is almost over, and with it a dream of oblivion to end a busy day.

Healthcare Nation - To be or not to be.

In these times when even our most dependable institutions are challenged to their breaking point, it is important to appreciate that it is the commitment of a community to provide for its members that is the bedrock of a society. Institutions come and go and are replaced with new ones as humanity tries and tries again to create systems and structures to achieve a defining mission.

All of these collective efforts include an identifiable membership with roles essential to the success of the mission. The roles played by various members change as an institution is forced to adapt to changing circumstances. An organization where roles are rigidly defined often neglects important feedback and fail to change with the times. Sometimes when a system is under stress it fails to fulfill the mission and contracts, decreasing the membership it benefits. Other times it is a change in the membership that forces a change in the system. More mouths to feed challenge nations and families, alike, to extend themselves to meet basic commitments. Priorities change. Values assert themselves at the expense of other values. A rising tide lifts all boats, except when it is a sea of red ink.

Returning to the theme that a society is defined the commitments it fulfills for its members; our nation’s identity is not just a matter of who we are, although that is a question that is the subject of great debate. Our nation is also defined by what it is we do for one another.

Other nations provide affordable healthcare to its members. In the United States today there co-exist two nations: one whose members have access to healthcare, and one whose members do not. The border between these two separate nations is not well guarded. With every pink-slip families slip across the porous border between Healthcare Nation and Healthcare-Not Nation. This is a border I wish our leaders would strive to secure. So long as we accept a sub-nation of people lacking access to healthcare there is going to be a risk that their numbers will swell, as their domain encompasses more and more Americans.

Lincoln spoke of how a house divided against itself will not stand. We must let our leaders know that we will not stand for our nation to endure the fate of a divided people.

John Kilian, RN

Bombings in Gaza: A Christmas present for Hamas?

In general, extremists seem to fear moderation more than they fear opposite extremists. Hamas may cry foul about these attacks, but maybe this sort of intervention is what keeps them relevant. A secure and lawful Palestine would have little place for the antics of Hamas's militant leadership. And the leaders who prosecuted the invasion of Lebanon to save Israel from Hizbullah are now pursuing the Hamas bogeyman with excellent zeal.

What both these sides may fear most is elections in Israel and U.S. leading to more constructive engagements that will, slowly but surely, leave them behind the way the IRA in Ireland succumbed to a reconciliation of former enemies through a political process.

The truth about Iraq

I am not sure the recent book on how the administration coerced intelligence services to corroborate the case to go to war with Iraq is all that earth shattering a disclosure. Cheney’s parade across the Potomac to strong arm analysts into telling us what he wanted to hear is well known. The public was fed a whopper the way Columbus lied to his crews about how far they had sailed in order to preempt a mutiny. Columbus is generally held in high regard, as evidenced by the national holiday in his name. While we are a long way from celebrating “W Day”, there is a good chance that the demise of Saddam’s despotic Baath regime will be replaced by republican institutions that will in time make Iraq a better place to live, raise a family, and explore and develop petroleum resources.

Beer Will Do

I think Monty Python had it right when they said that American beer is like making love in a canoe...

July 10, 2008

Beer: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

By George Will

WASHINGTON -- Perhaps like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world's second-largest brewer, Belgium's InBev, to buy control of the third-largest, Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: "The (alcoholic beverage) industry's continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer. ... "

"Non what"? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying is, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir in this correction of Investor's Business Daily. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

Leader of the K's backs Al Gore

I received this email from the nominal leader of the Ks ( http://theksband.com )

While I have not read it, I am certain it will reach many who will no doubt wish to respond and in the process fill my inbox with ever-branching email threads.

beginning of kommunique

This is an extremely rare political message to our mailing list. Forgive the intrusion, but the seriousness of the problem is such that I have to use what resources I have. I hope you forward it and/or hit some of the links below. I am very frightened for this world. I don’t want to wait for the ice caps to melt to realize that we have a great crisis, the crisis of our age with global climate change. We will kill the terrorists, and their bleak worldview will be rejected where it grows, but that will all be for naught if we face an ecological holocaust, or if we create a world of hardship, with a vast exodus from the equator and from island nations swallowed by a rising ocean. For the most part we’ve simply turned our minds from this vast problem, but Al Gore, God bless him, has not. He laid out a challenge the other day that we should embrace as a nation. Whatever you think of Al Gore, this is too big a problem to let go and this is the solution.

Here are some things we can do: http://www.wecansolveit.org/content/action/

Here’s how you can find out who your congressperson is. Write a letter. https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Likewise, your Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Here is Al Gore’s speech. This should become THE political movement of our time. Obama and McCain should be forced to adopt this challenge as their own. It sounds tough, but I think we’re ready for big changes. It can be a little scary, but that means we get to create the future, not let it happen to us. Here’s a link and the text below. http://www.wecansolveit.org/pages/al_gore_a_generational_challenge_to_repower_america/

[original kommunique included entire text of speech available at the link directly above]

That’s the end of the speech. Thanks for reading. We really need to do this. I hope you understand why I sent this, and hope you further the message.

Thanks,

Dan Kilian

The Ks
ending of kommunique