The Invasion of America

I've just read an opinion piece in the LATimes that brings home how deeply our Constitution has been comprimised from Nixon to Bush. The fact that the piece was written by Andrew P. Napolitano, senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel, makes it doubly alarming, for if someone associated with Fox News thinks we're in danger of a dictatorship, then we really are!

The original essay is at this link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-napolitano18feb18,0,1665050.story

Please read it. It is very chilling. Here is a summary:

The 4th Amendment has been uniformly interpreted as prohibiting the government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime. The courts have held that that requires a warrant by a judge, and only after government agents, under oath, have convinced the judge that there is probable cause of a crime. The 4th Amendment is one of only two instances in which the founders wrote a rule of criminal procedure into the Constitution itself, so that no Congress, president, or court could tamper with it.

In 1978, in response to Nixon's abuses, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which looks like a reaffirmation of the 4th Amendment, providing that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.

But FISA allows federal agents to appear in front of a secret court and to get a warrant based only on the target of surveillance being an agent of a foreign government, even a friendly government, and no illegal behavior need be shown. Later amendments removed the "agency" requirement, requiring only that the target be someone physically present in the U.S. who was not born here and is not an American citizen, and eliminated the 4th Amendment standard of probable cause. The amended FISA left one safeguard for the 4th Amendment: The target of spying could not be tried on the basis of FISA evidence, but only on evidence obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime (that is, through a constitutional method).

That changed with the Patriot Act, passed after 9/11, and its later versions. These laws allow FISA evidence to be used to prosecute and instruct federal judges that the evidence is admissible under the Constitution -- ignorning the fact that Congress can't decide what is constitutional and can't tell federal judges what evidence is admissible--only judges can do that.

Then the Bush administration demanded, and Congress gave, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans with no warrant, even though more than 99% of all FISA applications are approved. The so-called "Protect America Act of 2007" (which expired at the end of last week), gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are illegally spied on in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of Americans' conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.

We should all tremble at this frontal assault on our rights. The Constitution protects all persons. The government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not. If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American associates, for whom will we lower them next?

Welcome to the 1890s

I've been seeing a lot of articles lately about seemingly intractable social and economic trends. These include:

• Most Baby Boomers are not financially prepared for retirement and will likely have to keep working long past the "traditional" retirement age.
• The exodus from the work force of those Baby Boomers who can afford to retire will mean there are fewer productive workers paying into the Social Security system to help support retirees.
• People are living longer and longer.
• Ever year it becomes more difficult for young people to obtain a loan they can afford in order to buy a home
• The number of households consisting of one person is at an all-time high
• People are delaying marriage or living together to a later age
• Child care is difficult to arrange for working parents
• Mental health professionals cite isolation and loneliness as chronic, widespread social problems

I think that all of these negative trends could add up to a positive outcome if we returned to the household structure of the 1890s. You had multiple generations living under the same roof. Elderly people remained in the work force until they were unable to work. There was no standard retirement at age 65, that being an innovation of the Social Security system in the early 1930s, when the average life expectancy was about 68. When their children married, the couple often moved in with one of the sets of parents. By pooling their resources everyone could have a place to live. Grandparents who were at home provided child care.

It's probably not a solution for everybody, bit it might just become a trend! There are also possibilities that this sort of multi-generational lifestyle could work for those who are not necessarily related by blood or marriage--in fact, it might be more successful in some cases then living with kin.

"Life without People"...and Me (of course)

We watched a two-hour documentary on the History channel last night. I'd recorded it a few weeks back. It's called, "Life Without People" and it speculates how the world would change if people suddenly disappear. It relies on ecologists and engineers for most of its predictions, and it simulates the situation at various points after people disappear: 1 day, 5 days, 10 days, 1 month, and then 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and 10,000 years.

The bottom line: It would not take long for nature to overwhelm our suburbs and then our cities. Within 100 years, wildlife populations, both terrestrial and aquatic, would have rebounded to amazing levels, many of them actually finding new (though relatively short-lived) niches in vacate high-rise urban ruins. I felt comforted by this vision of the earth's recovery.

Of course, the disappearance of humans will not be complete and sudden. We might be wiped out by an "asteroid winter" caused by a single massive impact that throws dust into the upper atmosphere, but more likely our destruction would be over a longer period of time as from global warming. In that case, there might be a lot of die off of animal species, but at after a while (maybe a long while) some species would rebound or others would eventually evolve to replace them.

Also, it's sad that there'd be no one to know, but I suppose that applies to the 99.99% of the earth's history BEFORE people were around to reflect on the wonders of it all. And, of course, there're probably billions and billions of worlds we don't know anything about where there's nobody observing, and never will be, so it's probably best not to get bummed out that we're never going to see them either.

Oddly, for me, all of this begins to lap up against my absolute terror at non existence. Yes, I admit it: I'm having the classic middle-aged (as in "midlife" AND "Medieval") longing to believe in a immortal soul. But I just can't convince myself of it. So, rather than just accept that when I'm dead I won't know it (which is good), I just kinda totally freak out.

Anyway, it's nice to know that the earth and it's many species don't give a rip and they'll be leaping, frolicking, eating, carnivore, shitting, mating, reproducing, and all the other stuff WE like to do long after we're gone. God bless them!

***
I sent an email containing the comments above to my daughter just before posting it here. This is her very wise reponse:

That show ("Life without People") sounds very interesting. It's funny that I got this email from you musing on the Big Questions because I spent the afternoon listening to the first 11 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita on my IPod and am feeling wonderfully calm and peaceful about the whole thing.

There's a lot of window dressing in Hinduism but the basic idea that everything is One and that it's all a big soup caldron of existence and nonexistence and change, resonates with experiences I've had both in meditation and daily life. I don't really believe in an immortal soul but I do believe that I'm part of something much larger than my physical body.

I don't worry anymore whether there's Atman or Anatman, I just believe that I'm having the strange, wonderful, painful, unusual experience of being human at this moment in time and that at any moment I might be hit by a bus and become something else.