dot dk

It seems crazy, but the US has given a huge gift to criminal gangs: virtually unlimited profit. Furthermore, the US has given this gift more than once.

In 1920, alcohol was banned in the US. The idea was well intentioned but wrong-headed. Supporters of an alcohol-free America naively thought that making alcohol illegal would make it go away. There is little evidence to that effect. Passing a law does not magically change appetites.

What the change in law did do was put legitimate bar owners, merchants, truck drivers, and brewery workers out of business and simultaneously opened up vast new business opportunities for outlaws. Suddenly, instead of providing a living for legitimate, law-abiding people, it was a criminal enterprise.

This period saw explosive growth for gangsters like Al Capone, who went to work putting together bootlegging networks. Inevitably, turf wars started, and violence followed. Additionally, since it was outlaws making the stuff, there was no regulation or safety inspection. People died and went blind regularly during this time due to bad batches of home-made spirits. (more…)

We would say we’re sorry, but we’re not. We have our country, and you have yours. It’s not our fault that your country sucks. So nice try – trying to take our country away from us — but it’s not going to work. We’re going to beat you back across the border, whatever it takes, so you might as well get moving along now and make things easier for yourself.

Naturally, there are bleeding hearts here that constantly stick up for you. These are the same people that are determined to ruin our great country with tolerance, consideration, empathy, compassion, and a bunch of other stuff that can only lead to communism. These are the same people that say things like “this country was built by immigrants”, and “doesn’t the constitution say that all men are created equal and that we all have a right to pursue happiness?”

That’s just stupid. Everyone knows that what they meant was that all citizens are created equal. And even though it says “all”, they really meant all white citizens. That’s what they meant, but they didn’t feel that they had to spell it out because at the time America was all white, and they couldn’t imagine that it would ever become the way it is now.

The founding fathers never meant to include Mexicans, or blacks, or communists, gays, atheists, Muslims, or any of the other people that want nothing more than to destroy our country. These are the same people that elected Obama, and after we’ve run you out of the country, we’re going to run them out too. (more…)

So now we’re awash in pictures of oil-slicked wildlife, and the satellite images of a massive plume of toxic sludge swirling around the Gulf of Mexico. It’s depressing for the obvious reasons — that it’s a crime against nature — that it’s a devastating blow to both wildlife and to humans. There are no winners in this situation.

But it’s also depressing to read reactions and rationales. From Rush Limbaugh opining that the explosion on the oil rig was sabotage by liberals for political gain, to Newt Gingrich blathering about how it is unfortunate, but it shouldn’t stop us from expanding off-shore drilling. To Rand Paul, who apparently feels that being critical of a company that is responsible for the largest oil spill in US history is “Un-American.” (more…)

When we arrived in the US for vacation last month, we stayed in a hotel in Albuquerque the first night. It had been a rough night, and Ellen was especially tired and jet-lagged. She was fussing at breakfast, so I took her for a little walk.

I was walking past the pool area when a man in his late fifties approached me and said, “That was me — twenty seven years ago, I was walking around with my infant son at this very hotel.” We chatted a bit about being parents and such, and I mentioned that we were jet-lagged. He asked where we came in from. I told him we were visiting from Denmark.

“Denmark! Wow, they’re having big problems there!”

I didn’t know what he meant. I wondered if something terrible has happened since we left. I tried to think. There’s the economic crisis, but that’s not just in Denmark… maybe he was talking about the Mohammed cartoon crisis… but… that was almost four years ago… but that is typically the only thing Americans actually know about Denmark. So I said, “Yeah… I guess…” (more…)

Last week we went to Capulin, a volcano in Northern New Mexico. It’s about 90 minutes from Springer, the town where I was born and my grandparents still live. But, like the Sandia Tram, it’s something that I’d never seen.

The volcano doesn’t look like much when you’re approaching, and I thought it would turn out to be pretty lame, but when you start to climb, the view gets fantastic almost immediately. (There are hiking trails, but apparently none of them go from the bottom to the top, so you have only one choice — drive to the top.)

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We’ve been in New Mexico for two days. The jet-lag is starting to wear off, but it’s still not easy to stay awake during the day or asleep at night. Ellen, much to our relief, made the trip with very little fuss, but it’s a lot to ask of anyone, much less a seven month old. Luckily Lisbeth secured an infant bed on the long flight, and that helped a great deal.

It’s pretty strange to be on this side of things. For years I’ve been flying and I’ve been not infrequently annoyed by screaming babies on board. I think I was under the impression that the parents could do more to quiet the baby. But that’s silly. No one wants the baby to be quiet more than the parents, but there’s only so much you can do.

We traveled with Lisbeth’s parents, who joined us both to see where their son-in-law grew up, but also to visit the US, which they’ve never done. It really helped to have them on the plane because when we got tired we could hand Ellen off to them and get a little rest.

On Sunday, after introducing Ellen to my brother Ben and his wife Heather, we all went up to Sandia crest on the tram. Despite the fact that I grew up in New Mexico, I’d never been on the tram. It’s yet another example of things that tourists do and locals don’t. It was a pleasant surprise.

Americans don’t have any experience or perspective on socialized medicine. That’s abundantly clear from the horror stories that are currently circulating among opponents. There are many reasons given for the opposition. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to summarize what the objections are. The most famous, of course is the “death panels“.  But another objection is that it will further stifle the economy — that it’s socialistic and therefore bad business.

In my experience it’s the opposite. The system that America has currently is what’s bad for business. Costs are too high, and millions are uninsured — we all know that much. But it’s worse than that. Americans often stay in jobs they hate or don’t take jobs they might like better because they don’t want to risk losing their medical coverage. Now that is bad for business.

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Paul Krugman wrote this piece in The New York Times yesterday. I couldn’t agree more. In fact I wrote a very similar entry back in October called Regan’s Revenge. Amazing, considering that the GOP is allegedly the party of fiscal responsibility.

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence….The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression

According to this article, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair (a former navy commander, not an economist) says that the economic crisis outranks terrorism as the biggest threat to the US.

How ironic that — after the endless warnings from Bush administration about terrorism and the urgency to fight it “over there” — that the larger threat would turn out to be not only unrelated, but both domestic and entirely self-inflicted.