Thursday, June 28, 2007

Gaza down the tubes

There's a book called "Collapse," or something like that, which explains why certain societies collapse. The author has a list of reasons, including wars and environmental problems. One of them is that at some point there are simply too many people to be supported by the resources available. I think Gaza is getting there.

It's an area that in 1948 supported about 100,000 people. It now has about 1.5 million and they are still breeding like rabbits. That's about 10 times what we have here on the Oregon Coast, with a tiny fraction of the land and no resources.

The world has no record of letting that many people die since World War II except in Africa, but nobody wants a lot of disaffected Palestinian refugees in their country and Hamas is likely to continue the Koranic theory of women-as-breeding-stock. Is it possible for an area to become human "black hole," which collapses upon itself and from which nothing escapes?

Fatah is corrupt and ineffective, but perhaps not unusually so by Arab standards. They may get control of the West Bank and Israel may actually decide to cut a deal just because they aren't Hamas. But Gaza? It's like Scientology with its own country. I have a really bad feeling about this.

Bong Hits for the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is being described as more conservative than in the past. I think a better description is fascist. A conservative court would have deep reservations about the role of government in guiding individual actions into "proper" channels. This one seems ready to leap right in.

The kid in Alaska was penalized for displaying the phrase "Bong Hits for Jesus," which his school administration interpreted as advocating drug use. He did it on his own time, outside the school. The school is a government agency with a semi-monopoly on a vital service. There is a lot of coercion involved in making students show up in the first place.

There is no common English usage that leads from "Bong Hits for Jesus" to advocacy of anything. It doesn't make sense, as the kid pointed out. One would think that for words to show a specific intent, they would need to show some intent unambiguously, but apparently not in Alaska. It is not a sentence. It isn't even an intelligible phrase. There is no history of this student otherwise advocating drug use. The phrase does not match sentences or phrases used by others who are advocating drug use.

All we have is that some school administrator chose to assign a meaning to words, used outside the school, to which they then ascribe an intent on the basis of which they impose a punishment. This is scary stuff and certainly not something that a small-government advocating conservative should find appealing.