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In outer space, when an object becomes so powerful that it sucks everything nearby into itself, we call it a black hole.
In cyberspace, when a device becomes so powerful that it sucks every electronic function into itself, we call it a BlackBerry.
Over the last couple of years, we've witnessed the consolidation of more and more functions into what used to be called a cell phone. First it was a phone, then a texting device, then a camera, then a game console, then a Web surfer, then a music player. Then it became a reader of physical hyperlinks. Then a reader of 3-D digital maps. Then a universal remote. Today, we call this thing a smartphone. Within three years, we'll be calling it something else. As it absorbs one function after another, it's becoming strong enough to consume the ultimate prey: the minds of its users.
Here's one more job the phone is devouring: GPS.
Jenna Wortham presents the latest trend data in the New York Times:
More than 40 percent of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions, according to data from Compete, a Web analytics firm. For iPhone users, the figure is even higher, eclipsing 80 percent. ... Sales of traditional GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan (a unit of MiTAC International) have fallen sharply recently. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008. Garmin said unit sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous year. ... Meanwhile, shipments of smartphones in North America are expected to grow by 25 percent this year, with more than 80 percent of them equipped with GPS, according to ABI Research.
One reason for the exodus from dedicated GPS devices is cost: You can get a smartphone for $100 to $300 instead of spending $177 on a GPS unit. But the main reason is consolidation: Nobody wants to carry two devices—or three, or four, or five—when you can carry one that does all five things.
Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.
What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money's on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.
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According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, masturbation is "intrinsically and gravely disordered." That's because "sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes."
But what if playing with the equipment helps you make babies? Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program. According to a summary of the study, "The men were instructed to ejaculate daily."
More here.
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Shankar Vedantam is a people person. I don't mean that in the ordinary sense, as in, "Do I look like a @#$% people person?" I mean that, in addition to being delightful company, he writes about people. He's interested in how we think.
So when he writes about machines, as he did last week, something funny is going on. His topic was the recent Metro train crash in Washington, D.C., which killed nine people. How did it happen?
One theory is the automation paradox:
The more reliable the system, the more likely it is that humans in charge will "switch off" and lose their concentration, and the greater the likelihood that a confluence of unexpected factors that stymie the algorithm will produce catastrophe. ... After the previous fatal accident on Metro, in which a train overshot the Shady Grove station on an icy night, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the driver of the train had reported overshooting problems at earlier stops but was told not to interfere with the automated controls.
In that case, automation researcher Greg Jamieson points out, "For a year before the accident, the transit authority had put in position a directive that you were not to drive the train in manual." Vedantam concludes: "No matter how clever the designers of automated systems might be, they simply cannot account for every possible scenario, which is why it is so dangerous to eliminate human ‘interference.' "
This is the problem we discussed after the February plane crash that killed 50 people near Buffalo, N.Y. Initial evidence indicated that the pilot misunderstood what the autopilot was doing, and, by overriding the machine, caused the crash. Further evidence presented at a May hearing confirms that
the plane, which was collecting ice on its windshield and wings, was slowing to an unsafe speed. But when a warning system began vibrating the control column to get their attention, the captain pulled the nose up when he should have pushed it down. ... [C]onfronting the vibrating column, called a stick shaker, was probably something new and startling. The airline that was contracted with Continental Airlines to make the one-hour commuter flight, Colgan Air, said on Wednesday that it had given the crew simulated training in the activation of the stick shaker, but not in the next step, activation of the stick pusher, which takes control and pushes the nose of the plane down. In this instance, the stick pusher kicked in shortly after the captain pulled instead of pushed. "I don't see any evidence that he ever understood the situation he was in," said Dr. Dismukes ...
Shortly after the Buffalo crash, I outlined three possible responses to such disasters. One was take the controls away from the machines, on the grounds that difficult conditions require human attention and judgment. The opposite approach was to take the controls away from the humans, on the grounds that pilots can't be trusted to override the machine's superior judgment. A third, hybrid solution was to teach the humans how to read and collaborate with the machine's intentions.
The third approach seems to be the one most clearly supported by the evidence in the Buffalo crash: Flight crews must be trained to interpret and interact with their autopilots. Vedantam makes a similar point about automated systems in general: "Several studies have found that regular training exercises that require operators to turn off their automated systems and run everything manually are useful in retaining skills and alertness." We have to know when to second-guess our machines and how to operate without their help. Sometimes, they'll err fatally unless we intervene. But our intervention can itself be fatal. The key is to understand when to step in and when to butt out. That's the role of human intelligence in a machine-controlled world.
It's fun to go to summer sci-fi movies and wonder whether humans or machines would prevail in a mortal showdown. But in the real world, machines aren't our enemies. They're our collaborators. If those 50 people in Buffalo died in a fight between a human and a machine, it wasn't a fight chosen by either side. It was a misunderstanding. And since we're the ones who made the machines, it's our job to teach one another how to work with them, around them, and without them.
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A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tentatively approved a flu vaccine for dogs. The agency said the vaccine's purpose was "the control of disease associated with canine influenza virus infection, type A, subtype H3N8," which "has now been detected in dogs in 30 states." The vaccine was approved only after "the acceptance of data supporting product purity, safety and a reasonable expectation of efficacy."
At the time, I thought this was a nice expression of man's love for his best friend. We don't just develop medicines for ourselves; we also make them for animals under our care. And we don't just treat your dog like, well, a lab animal; we test the vaccine first to be sure it's safe.
Then I saw this follow-up from Donald McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:
Some veterinarians have found that the dogs that tend to die from [this flu] are the "brachycephalics"—dogs with short snub noses. Just as obesity has proved dangerous to human flu victims because of the weight on their chests, being bred to have a short, bent respiratory tract is dangerous for dogs. "It really puts a strain on their ability to breathe," Dr. Crawford said. "They can't move air in and out of their lungs."
This is the kind of thing that sickens me about dog breeding. This health defect we're so generously treating? We caused it. As I've noted before, dogs are a 15,000-year reckless genetic experiment. We've bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, and retrievers for obedience. We've given some dogs legs so short they couldn't run, and we've given others, such as the unlucky pooches now dying of H3N8 flu, noses so flat they couldn't breathe.
So congratulations to us. We're now trying to fix a problem we created. Will this teach us to stop breeding such defects into animals? Don't count on it. Some creatures are just slow to learn.
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Sanford's e-mails paint a vivid and sad picture. It's a picture of two people in love but tragically bound by commitments they have already made. A man who has been married for two decades seems to be discovering, for the first time, how love feels. He writes of solitude, longing, and spirituality in a style that oscillates between Spanish love songs and bad country music. He seems naive about everything: love, poetry, and e-mail. He is writing for publication and doesn't know it.
Wise up, cheaters. Your passion for what's-her-name may be gone with the sunrise, but text is forever. Just because it has vanished from your screen doesn't mean it has ceased to exist, any more than your wife and kids cease to exist when you fly to Argentina.
More here.
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Eight years ago, when [Hajnal] Ban was 23, she decided she was too short. How short? Around 5 feet 1 inch. So Ban changed her body. She went to Russia, where, as the Times of London put it, doctors agreed to "break both her legs in four places and stretch them slowly for 1mm every day for nine months." Then she wore plaster casts for three more months. Result: Ban gained 3 inches. She entered politics, and today, she's a city councilwoman.
How far should we let cosmetic surgery go? How much trauma and risk should we let people endure for the sake of looking the way we want them to look, especially when they might otherwise learn to accept themselves as they are?
More here.
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Can President Obama's "common ground" meetings between pro-lifers and pro-choicers accomplish anything? What topics and ideas should they focus on? Steve Waldman and I hash out the options, looping in our own ideas and many of the good points being made in an ongoing discussion at RH Reality Check. Abortion, birth control, surrogate pregnancy, George Tiller, and what the hell business men have talking about this stuff—it's all there. You can watch our conversation, courtesy of our friends at Bloggingheads.tv, by clicking on the video link above or by going to the Bloggingheads site. I look like I just rolled out of bed, but that's nothing new. Next time I'm gonna wear a nice shirt like Steve's and grow back some of that hair I lost.
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How do you cross a heavily guarded border? By going underneath it.
That's the lesson of the Gaza tunnels, which we explored in January and February. It's the key to undersea drug smuggling and terrorism via submarines. And it's happening along the U.S.-Mexico land border, too. William Booth of the Washington Post, who brought us the latest on drug-running submersibles, has an update from U.S. Border Patrol agents in Arizona:
In the past nine months, they have discovered 16 new tunnels dug by smugglers in Nogales to move drugs, migrants, cash and weapons between Mexico and the United States. The number of tunnels sets a new record. ... The digging has become so extensive beneath Nogales that the southbound traffic lane through the international port of entry collapsed. "Before that, the parking lot at the customs office caved in," Howells said. "They collapse all the time."
The tunnelers pop up all over town. Border Patrol agents report that it is not uncommon to see a manhole cover suddenly lift during rush hour and men run out of the hole. The passageways come up through rental house floors, in abandoned stores and in back yards. Agents have found exits near a taco stand, a Chinese restaurant and the local Burger King. ... The latest tunnel, found two weeks ago, was 83 feet long and had ventilation tubes, wooden beams and plywood ceilings. It was just down the block from the port of entry manned by hundreds of U.S. agents.
As we learned from researching the Gaza tunnels, detection is difficult. Ground-penetrating radar, for instance, was a favorite tool along the Mexican border until tunnelers discovered that it can't see deeper than than one meter in wet dirt or 15 meters (49 feet) in sand, dry soil, or rock, which means you can dig below its range. The tunnels in Nogales seem to be near the surface. But if their numbers are increasing, then probably so are those of the tunnels we can't see.
In a world increasingly saturated by patrols, barriers, and surveillance, you have to remember that space is three-dimensional. You can't spot threats and breaches just by looking around. You have to look up. You have to look down at the ground. And increasingly, you have to look through it.
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Is it rude to focus on your smartphone during meetings?
It's way more than that. It's another sign that the virtual world is overtaking the physical world.
Here are the evolving facts on the ground, so to speak, as presented by Alex Williams in Monday's New York Times:
The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds—and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.
Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors. A few years ago, only "the investment banker types" would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. "Now it's everybody." He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.
It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table—not praying—while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed. "You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said.
The Times headlined this article, "At Meetings, It's Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." But the story is much bigger than manners. It's the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. We've talked about this trend before in the context of cell phones and driving. When phone calls draw your eyes off the road, and when electronic messages pull your attention out of business meetings, it's time to think about what's happening to the relationship between your mind and your body. You're drifting out of physical space. Not just you but the millions of others who are doing the same thing.
That point about "the etiquette debate ... tilting in the favor of smartphone use"? That's the virtual world gaining parity and vying for supremacy. That guy who speeds up his presentation when most of his listeners disappear into their BlackBerrys? That's the physical world struggling to keep up. That observation from Clinton's adviser about "half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting"? That's no joke. They really are having a meeting. It just happens to be in the virtual world. If your body is in the room but your brain is offline, you're missing that meeting. You're absent.
The virtual world has many advantages in the fight for your attention. It can connect you to people and places far away. It can tell you almost instantly what you need to know. It lets you flip through incoming messages at your own pace, unlike the boring presentation you're enduring in the physical world. And it lets you communicate privately, even in public. That's what many of those "submeetings" are, an executive tells Williams. They're exchanges of "things that you might not say out loud."
There's the real story: People are migrating from the old world to the new one. That's why you're here, reading and exchanging ideas with people you've never met offline. "Manners" is just the old world's way of protesting this migration. But protestation is weak. The old world has no inherent claim to your attention. It will have to earn it.
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In today's article on tobacco regulation, I wrote that President Obama was still apparently a nicotine addict. When a reporter asked yesterday whether Obama was still smoking, his press secretary answered, "He struggles with it every day."
This afternoon, shortly after the article was posted, Obama was asked at a press conference, "How many cigarettes a day do you now smoke? Do you smoke alone or in the presence of other people? And do you believe the new law should help you to quit? If so, why?" He replied:
The new law that was put in place is not about me. It's about the next generation of kids coming up. So I think it's fair, Margaret, to just say that you just think it's neat to ask me about my smoking as opposed to it being relevant to my new law. But that's fine. I understand. ... It's an interesting human interest story.
Look, I've said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. ... Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family. And, you know, I would say that I am 95 percent cured. But ... there are times where I mess up.
Two things in this answer are worth noting. One, the president denied smoking daily but didn't deny smoking. He said, "I don't do it in front of my family," not "I don't do it." It's reasonable to infer that he isn't just using some kind of smokeless tobacco or nicotine-replacement therapy. He's been smoking outright, albeit privately and infrequently.
Second, he's completely wrong to suggest that questions about his own tobacco use are irrelevant to the law he just signed. Drug policy has to be realistic. It has to work with human nature. If the president of the United States, blessed with all the quitting resources anyone could ask for, still can't control his addiction without the aid of nicotine gum, that's worth taking into account as he and others shape tobacco policy. And if he's still smoking cigarettes because gum alone isn't doing the job, that's just as important to know. We have to understand exactly what aspects of the smoking experience are addictive. Otherwise, we can't effectively modify or regulate it.
So stop pretending your smoking habits are nobody's business, Mr. President. You gave up that defense when you signed yesterday's bill.
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If you want to know what Obama really thinks about tobacco, don't read his lips. Read his teeth. To relieve his addiction and protect his health, he's been chewing nicotine gum. The law he just signed authorizes the FDA to expedite approval of nicotine lozenges, gum, and patches. It encourages the agency to broaden the grounds for prescribing such products and to authorize their "extended use." It puts regulators smack in the middle of the nicotine business so they can turn it to better use. If only all our drug policies were this rational.
More here.
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A few weeks ago, I noticed an article in the Los Angeles Times about "minicows." "In the last few years, ranchers across the country have been snapping up mini Hereford and Angus calves that fit in a person's lap," wrote reporter P.J. Huffstutter. "Today, there are more than 300 miniature-Hereford breeders in the U.S., up from fewer than two dozen in 2000. And there are about 20,000 minicows, compared with fewer than 5,000 a decade ago ..."
Huffstutter explains the animals' virtues. Mini-Herefords "consume about half [the feed] of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers," he notes. "Farmers who raise mini Jerseys brag how each animal provides 2 to 3 gallons of milk a day." Grass-fed minicows also "reached their mature weight faster, so they could be sold for meat sooner."
I was all set to write about minicows as the latest human manipulation of animal genetics. Then I realized that I had it backward. According to Huffstutter:
Minicows are not genetically engineered to be tiny, and they're not dwarfs. They are drawn from original breeds brought to the U.S. from Europe in the 1800s that were smaller than today's bovine giants, said Ron Lemenager, professor of animal science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. ... Big cows emerged as a product of the 1950s and '60s, when farmers were focused on getting more meat and didn't fret as much about the efficient use of animal feed or grasslands. "Feed prices were relatively cheap, and grazing lands were accessible," Lemenager said. "The plan was to get more meat per animal. But it went way too far. The animals got too big and eat so much."
In a way, this makes minicows even more fascinating. We did manipulate cows' genes for our purposes. We adapted them to our environment: plentiful land and feed. But then our environment changed. It became better suited to natural cows—or, more accurately, cows that were the product of human manipulation up to a century ago—than to the artificial cows of the last 50 years. So artifice unraveled itself. We went back to the original gene pool. Except that now, having becoming used to oversized 20th-century cows, we call the modern offspring of their ordinary-sized predecessors "minicows."
Cows aren't the only animals we can shrink. Two years ago, when parents of a disabled girl "attenuated" her growth through surgery and hormones, I argued that
economic and ecological forces are going [that] way. Smaller people consume fewer resources, live longer, and are cheaper to transport. They can fit in a Hyundai. Forty-five years ago, if you were 6 feet tall, you couldn't fly in a NASA space capsule. Now, you can barely fly coach. Blessed are the short, for they shall inherit the earth.
That's certainly the argument for minicows. They fit the latest "trend in farm efficiency—the move to ranchettes, smaller operations run by families or small groups of workers," Huffstutter writes. Today's ecology and economics demand smaller livestock.
The same is true of people. We're getting too fat for our planet. Many of us no longer fit old-fashioned toilets, ambulances, or coffins. Yet we've become so accustomed to our new size that only 15 percent of obese people now recognize themselves as obese. Fearing the economic consequences, governments around the world are groping for measures to restore us to our previous size. If they succeed, I wonder what we'll call the thin people of tomorrow. Minihumans, anyone?
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How could anyone kill her own newborn child?
If you talk to pregnant women or read accounts of what they say to friends and counselors, you'll notice a pattern. Those who are happy to be pregnant and expect to give birth describe what they're carrying as a baby. Those who don't want to be pregnant and are seeking or contemplating abortion avoid that word. Given the same thing at the same stage of development, we see what we want to see: a child if we want a child, an unformed embryo if we don't.
I like to think this subjective mentality is confined to the pre-viable fetus or at least to pregnancy. But what if it isn't? What if, to some people, it extends to newborns?
Infanticide is rare but not as rare as you might think. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of infanticides in this country, defined as homicides of anyone under age 5, has ranged between 500 and 800 per year for the last three decades. Of these cases, about 40 percent involve children under the age of 1. If you have the stomach to read about such tragedies, here are articles about some of them: 2006 cases in Georgia, South Dakota, and New York; two more New York cases in 2007; and a 2008 case in Texas. Serial infanticides are the most disturbing. Here's an alleged 2005 case in California, a 2007 case in Texas, and a 2008 case in Germany.
The latest horror story is unfolding in France. Edward Cody of the Washington Post reports:
Véronique Courjault, by her own admission, smothered the two babies after giving birth to them secretly in Seoul, the first in 2002 and the second in 2003. She also has acknowledged killing a newborn and burning the body in her garden after a first secret pregnancy in 1999 ... [A]s the presiding judge pressed for an explanation—the court will have to decide whether she knew what she was doing—she offered only vague clues as to what was going through her mind at the time. "What I did is so monstrous, without explanation," she responded, according to reports from the courtroom. "For me, those children did not have a real existence." Asked how she could carry the children for nine months and still feel they had no existence, she said, "I knew it, and then I no longer knew it."
This is the danger of denying that what you're carrying is a developing baby. Is your denial based on the undeveloped state of your pregnancy or on a determined refusal to see what you don't want to see? If it's the former, then at some point, if you continue the pregnancy, you'll start to see a baby. But if it's the latter, you might not. Your denial might extend all the way to birth or even beyond it.
That's one reason why, if you're unhappily pregnant, you should look at an ultrasound of what you're carrying. That goes for the potential father, too. Nobody can make you look, nobody should make you look, and you certainly should ignore bogus "information" scripts like the one concocted by a bunch of U.S. senators two years ago. But there's nothing bogus about an ultrasound. It will make you face what's growing inside you and the urgency of deciding whether to terminate it, even if termination is still the right choice. Otherwise, you risk sliding into the mentality of denial. And there's no telling where that ends.
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Last week, when Ross Douthat made a case for "regulating abortion," I asked him and other pro-lifers how far we should go. The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act has a maximum jail sentence of two years for doctors who perform the forbidden procedure. Is that the kind of regulation we should apply to abortions? Would the country stand for it?
Today, let's turn the tables on those of us who oppose abortion regulation. How far should we go? Would you oppose regulation even of abortions aimed at preventing the births of girls? Because there's increasing evidence that such abortions, which take place by the millions in Asia, are now being done by the thousands in the United States as well.
Let's start with the data noted here last year, when
economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.
A recent paper by economist Jason Abrevaya adds:
The evidence from the California natality data is particularly striking for Indian births between 1991 and 2005: second-born children are 0.9 percentage points more likely to be boys, third-born children 6.6 percentage points more likely, and fourth-born children 8.1 percentage points more likely. Moreover, Indian parents are significantly more likely to have a boy (and a terminated pregnancy since last birth) if they have had only daughters previously. The simple framework of Section 4.5 suggests that the unusually high boy percentages among third- and fourth-born Indian children in California would be consistent with gender-selective abortion rates of around 10%. ...
Using census data, Abreveya estimates that from 1991 to 2004, U.S. families of Chinese or Indian descent aborted more than 2,200 fetuses just for being girls. (For the data, see Table 13 of his paper; he explains his calculations on Pages 23-24.)
Researchers had expected sex selection among Asians to decline as they became Americans. But in today's New York Times, Sam Roberts reports:
Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion. ... [A] number of experts expressed surprise to see evidence that the preference for sons among Asian-Americans has been so significantly carried over to this country.
Roberts quotes one woman who got pregnant with a boy after having two girls. The woman says flatly: "If the third one was going to be a girl, then I would say probably I would have terminated."
Should that abortion be allowed? And if legal intervention in such cases is unwise, should we do something short of that? Should schools teach that aborting girls is wrong? Should doctors counsel couples not to do it? Should community leaders speak out against it? The last president called for a culture of life. Should this president call for a culture of respect for women?
What about purveyors of sex selection? Roberts notes that at least one assisted reproduction provider, the Fertility Institutes, offers sex selection and "has unabashedly advertised its services in Indian- and Chinese-language newspapers in the United States." (The company has also promoted and withdrawn an offer to select embryos for "eye color, hair color and complexion.") This form of sex selection takes place when the offspring are tiny, dish-bound embryos, not fetuses. The clinic's medical director, Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, says the practice is "not harming anyone." Is he right? Should he be allowed to continue peddling sex selection (as he does in this video) to Asian-Americans? And if it's fine to advertise this service at the embryonic stage, why not at the fetal stage?
Absolutists on both sides need to think carefully. If you're pro-life, how far are you willing to go in regulating abortion? If you're pro-choice, how far are you willing to go in leaving it unregulated?
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Banning abortions isn't just a statement of "respect for human life," as many pro-lifers imagine. It's a commitment to investigate, prosecute, and punish.
I'm all for morality, custom, compromise, and common sense. These elements of society have plenty to say about abortion, and they're saying it. But criminal law? Do we really want to go that far?
More here.
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Good news for fat fliers and the passengers who sit next to them: We may be heading toward a compromise involving wider seats.
Two months ago, when United joined other carriers in requiring oversize fliers to buy two seats, I argued that this binary policy was unnecessary. A better model is the extra leg room United sells to tall passengers:
Why shouldn't fat people have a similar option? Most of them don't need two seats side-by-side any more than we long-legged guys need two seats front-to-back. Like us, they just need a few extra inches. ... If United can swap out a row of three normal coach seats for two wide ones, two fat people should be able to buy those seats for an extra 50 percent instead of an extra 100 percent. That's the simplest nonbinary solution. But if the flight is full, or if swapping out a seat row is too difficult, here's an alternative: Let other passengers sell part of their seat width to those who need it.
In today's Wall Street Journal, one flier says he's open to the sale idea: "If people are so large or overweight that they can't get the armrest down, then these people should be required to sit elsewhere, pay for an additional seat or pay me for the part of my seat they are spilling into." But the wider-seats option is less embarrassing and should be easier to implement. And the Journal's Scott McCartney reports interest from both sides:
Frequent travelers and advocates for the obese would like to see airlines offer a few rows of wider coach seats and charge extra—just as they do with rows of expanded legroom. Instead of six seats across a typical single-aisle plane, why not have four or five seats and charge 50% extra on a coach fare? ... "We're willing to pay for what we are rightfully using," says Peggy Howell, spokeswoman for the National Association To Advance Fat Acceptance. ... "What we really need are seats half-again as wide," she says. ... United, which offers extra legroom in "Economy Plus" rows to frequent fliers and customers who pay extra, says it will review the wide-seat idea.
Substituting a two-seat row for a three-seat row, at a 50 percent premium per seat, is a no-brainer. If the airline wants to require that such rows be purchased whole and with plenty of advance notice, those are reasonable conditions. It shouldn't be too hard to make each extra-wide seat purchase conditional on a second purchase to fill out the row. On flights with four seats across the middle, a three-seat row could be substituted. On smaller planes with only two-seat rows, wide fliers would have to buy an extra seat. And if extra leg room is necessary, sell it the same way it's already sold to thin people.
This plan shouldn't take long to resolve or implement. Airlines and obesity interest groups just need to sit down and work out the deal. Preferably in comfortable seats.
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Will the next attack on the United States come from submarines?
When I asked that question seven years ago, the model I had in mind was the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group infamous for naval suicide strikes. A Tiger supporter had recently been caught building a submersible vessel.
Last month, the Tigers were wiped out by the Sri Lankan military. But the technology they were developing, submersibles, has caught on. "U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles," the Washington Post reports. "U.S. officials and their Colombian counterparts have detected evidence of more than 115 submersible voyages since 2006," and "U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year."
Why submersibles? They're hard to detect and easy to sink. The Post explains:
Until recently, submariners caught by authorities could not be charged in the United States or Colombia if the cocaine was scuttled. "The vessels are built to sink. When they open the valves, tons of water come in, and in a minute, or a minute and a half, they sink," [a Colombian admiral] said. "There is no evidence, and what starts as a counterdrug operation becomes a rescue operation." ... "With no drugs found, we couldn't prosecute," said [an] assistant U.S. attorney. At least eight crews have been returned to Colombia after rescue, without being charged.
Is it expensive to sink your own sub? Not if you're a drug lord. Each sub costs about $1 million to produce. The crew gets $500,000 or less. A recent 6.4-ton payload of cocaine was worth more than $100 million. As a percentage of the gross, subs are so cheap that they're routinely scuttled anyway.
That's the genius of submersibility. Several months ago, during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, we explored the terrestrial underworld of the Gaza tunnels. The tunnelers were developing a three-dimensional way of thinking about land: While one side built walls and stationed soldiers above ground, the other side went down 60 feet and dug past those barriers.
The nautical underworld is even better. You don't have to dig. You just glide. Even the semisubmersible crafts built by the drug lords are low enough to evade radar. And underwater, you can do something else that can't be done on land: dump your contraband and let gravity take it beyond your enemy's reach. No evidence, no conviction.
To stop this tactic, Congress recently enacted the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008, which declares that anyone operating "any submersible vessel or semi-submersible vessel that is without nationality ... with the intent to evade detection, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both."
Maybe that law will deter submarine drug commerce. But what about submarine terrorism? Ultimately, "U.S. officials fear that the rogue vessels could be used by terrorists intent on reaching the United States with deadly cargos," the Post reports. In fact, "Colombian officials say some former military personnel might be helping to design, construct and direct the vessels" used by the drug lords. If so, all that's needed is a financial lure from al-Qaida to build a vessel for a different mission.
It might not be a suicide mission, either. Drug submersible builders are "trying to develop a remote-controlled model," according to officials contacted by the Post. Two men were arrested last year, apparently while peddling this technology. No crew necessary. Just pack the radioactive bomb aboard your craft, slip it underwater, and hit any coastal target.
Think about that the next time you take off your shoes at an airport security gate. If we expect the next 9/11 attack to come from the sky, we may be looking the wrong way.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Obama aides have convened meetings between pro-choicers and pro-lifers to seek "common ground" in the abortion debate. Already, the two sides are sniping in the press and refusing the simplest concessions. Some of the people involved in the abortion meetings are my friends or acquaintances. They all mean well, and I'm glad they're participating. But they aren't trying hard enough. They should watch the president's Cairo speech. He's making serious concessions and taking real risks. They should do the same.
More here.
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Let's be blunt about what's going on here. We tolerated smoking until science proved it was harmful to nonsmokers. As momentum grew, the war on smoking became cultural, with disapproval and ostracism of anyone who lit up. Electronic cigarettes have removed the war's scientific basis, but our cultural revulsion persists. Therefore, so does our prohibition and condemnation.
More here.
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You tell yourself that abortion is murder. Maybe you even say that when a pollster calls. But like most of the other people who say such things in polls, you don't mean it literally. There's you, and then there are the people who lock arms outside the clinics. And then there are the people who bomb them. And at the end of the line, there's the guy who killed George Tiller.
If you don't accept what he did, then maybe it's time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided?
More here.