I can’t let these 30 days go by without saying something about the story that has everyone talking. Everyone has their own theories about how to clean up the disaster in the Gulf. And the blame game has been played by everyone as well, with no clear winners. I’m not going to jump into any of those debates, but I did have a couple of observations that I’d like to share.

First of all, I’m surprised by the reaction (or lack thereof) by all of the other oil companies. Besides being hauled in front of Congress to testify, there hasn’t been a lot of communication from your Exxons and your Shells. I guess that’s to be expected to some extent, their first reaction was probably to sit back and see how bad the backlash against BP would be, and let them take the initial brunt of it. But we’re sixty days into this catastrophe, and I can’t believe that BP’s peers haven’t stepped up and took a more prominent role in the cleanup effort. It would be outstanding PR for them, to come together, form some kind of “dream team” of engineers and leaders, roll up their sleeves, and then take the slow motion walk into the fray, like Bruce Willis and his roughnecks in Armageddon. But that hasn’t happened yet (to my knowledge). And I’m surprised, because the CEOs of all of the other oil companies have to realize that if they don’t jump in and do something voluntarily, the government is going to make them do something they probably won’t like very much. Oh, and it won’t be cheap. So it is in all of our best interests for them to solve this problem on their own, because the government’s regulatory reaction to this mess is going to cost them a fortune, and they will certainly pass that cost on to us. Get ready for five-dollar gasoline.

Which brings me to my second observation. We have not seen the customary increase in gas prices in the run-up to summer, as we usually do this time of year. Gas seems to be about the same price it was all winter. Why is that? Could it be because an oil company that raises gas prices with the Gulf clean-up as a backdrop is likely to wind up on the list of America’s Most Hated, right along with BP? Can we presume that gas prices will remain flat for as long as pelicans covered in goo is the lead story on the news every night? Just wondering what that will mean in the long term. If we make it the entire summer without significant increases, the oil companies will have to come up with a new perennial excuse for summer’s higher prices. Or maybe they will just have to admit that it’s all a scam.

You’ve no doubt seen the story by now of this Seattle police officer caught on videotape. The headline reads “Seattle officer punches girl in face during jaywalking stop,” which is a bit sensationalist, but does sum up the salient points. Watch the entire clip on YouTube, however, and you’re provided with some context for the events that transpired. I find myself having sympathy for all parties involved.

The cop is easily the bad guy in this story. Considering the entire incident stemmed from his attempt to enforce a law against jaywalking, it is especially sad. Jaywalking is not a crime, and there should be no laws against it. Choosing to cross a street at an unsafe point is foolish, but people have a right to be stupid. Just like they have a right to drive without seatbelts or motorcycle helmets. Why do we, as a society, continue to allow pointless laws such as these to be passed, and then, more importantly, why do we continue to task cops with enforcing the stupid things?

Given all of that, resisting arrest in this particular case was warranted, in my opinion. No crime occurred, no one was harmed, so no one — including the cop — has any reason to involve themselves in the lives of innocent people just trying to cross a street. Now, do I believe that these individuals were taking a principled stand against what they viewed to be tyrannical behavior on the part of the local legislature and constabulary? Hardly. I could be wrong, but I’m going to guess that their resistance was based on other factors. Nevertheless, objecting to unwarranted searches and seizures is justified, and they have my full support.

There is also the larger matter of the cop’s use of excessive force. There should be no question in anyone’s mind that punching an unarmed woman in the face, even under those circumstances, is completely reprehensible. This officer should be required to publicly apologize to all parties involved, and then promptly be fired from his job. Having said that, I can certainly recognize that he found himself in a very difficult and stressful situation. His training seems to have kept the situation from escalating any more than it did. But just like the folks who chose to cross the street, he made a choice too — when he decided to enforce an unjust law. So the situation was largely his own making. Maybe next time he will think twice about attempting to enforce a stupid law, and maybe they will think twice about their own safety.

[Update: pretty good discussion on this one going on in the forum]

I’ve written about how rights are digital, but there is another quality that I’d like to explore a bit. While all of our rights may be equal, they may not always be symmetrical. We all have the right to do whatever we want unless or until it infringes upon the rights of another to do the same, but what happens when two parties are exercising the same right, equally, at the same time, but only one of them is infringing on the other?

For example, few would deny that one has the right to sit out in the back yard and enjoy the peace and quiet of the outdoors. But at the same time, sitting outside with your stereo on listening to your favorite tunes would also seem to be a right we should all enjoy. It is clear that the right to be as loud as you want, when exercised by multiple people simultaneously, can lead to conflict. Resolving these disputes is beyond the scope of this essay, but the intriguing thing to me is this: the guy who wants to be as quiet as he can doesn’t infringe upon anyone else’s rights, it’s only his next door neighbor, with the amplifier that goes to eleven that infringes on others. So there is an asymmetry in the right to be as loud as you want.

Another example would be walking down the street. You walk at your own pace, and certainly no one would argue that this isn’t an inherent right — you walk as fast as you like. But I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation where someone has stepped aside, to allow faster walkers to pass, with a polite “excuse me.” This act is recognition of the fact that exercising the right to choose the speed at which we walk is asymmetrical, and that walking slowly prevents others from exercising their right to walk fast. The converse is not true, however — the fast walkers do not prevent the slow walkers from walking slow — so again, this right is asymmetrical.

The state of Georgia recently considered this assymetry by proposing to fine slow drivers. I think this is a step in the right direction. The next step, of course, would be to eliminate the penalties against those who want to drive fast, since they are not infringing on anyone’s rights.

I am hereby starting the national dialog on reforming our nation’s Appetite Care laws. Your appetite cannot be ignored, after all. If you cannot afford to address your appetite issues, then you will surely die. So, clearly, you have a basic human right to appetite care. But not everyone sees it this way.

There are a number of greedy appetite care providers out there, charging exorbitant rates for their services. The other day I went into one of these places, and got served and then they proceeded to give me a bill! I tried to explain that I had been there once before when I was hungry and had paid them the last time I was there. They tried to deny me coverage — they said hunger was a pre-existing condition! This is outrageous! Are we supposed to just go without? Obviously, the government needs to step in and do more. The current Appetite Care system has been wildly successful, so why not just expand it to include all Americans? It seems like a no-brainer.

As long as the government is going to regulate every aspect of marriage (who can get married, who pays for the kids, etc.), I think Congress should go ahead and eliminate the moral ambiguity of adultery. Sen John Ensign’s comments about his extramarital affair last year highlighted the fact that adultery isn’t technically illegal. Why isn’t it? Shouldn’t we have a law against sleeping around? I think it would reduce the number of failed marriages, and illegitimate children, thus lessening the impact these behaviors have on society. We (allegedly) protect the institution of marriage by forbidding homosexuals. We protect married couples from temptation by going after prostitutes. We protect our children by going after deadbeat dads. Certainly there is sufficient moral justification for it, so isn’t it time we take the final step and outlaw infidelity?

Oh wait, we can’t do that. Then members of Congress would have to go to jail even more frequently that they do already.

Now let’s address our hypocrisy where drugs are concerned. Interestingly, when the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in 1914, it was estimated that 1.3% of the population was addicted to some kind of drug. In 1970, when the so-called War on Drugs was launched with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, the rate of addiction was again estimated at 1.3%. And today, after 40 years of violence and billions of dollars wasted, the addiction rate in America is… drum roll, please — 1.3%.

The abject futility of the “War on Drugs” can no longer be ignored — even the Obama Administration has stopped using the term as the President has recognized that it is counter-productive — and the American people are slowly starting to realize this as well. Last week, NPR ran a series of stories on the shift in attitudes towards marijuana. One individual, whose livelihood depends on continued prosecution of the War, not surprisingly is opposed to relaxing the regulation of marijuana. Andrew Cummings, a Drug Court director in Dekalb County Georgia, said, “People often think about marijuana, and understandably so, as one might think about having a drink at the end of the day and relaxing, but it doesn’t stop there for a lot of people. And as the potency increases, the likelihood of dependency increases.” He actually makes the comparison to everyone’s favorite legal drug, alcohol, with no hint of irony. Alcohol has all of the same potential negative effects, and yet we allow it to be sold on virtually every street corner. Isn’t it time we take the final step and outlaw alcohol?

Oh wait, we tried that, and Prohibition taught us that we cannot ban a substance. We lack the Constitutional authority, and attempting to do so only creates underground markets that spawn all kinds of intolerable side effects. The most obvious of which is the businessman who sells these products is forced to resolve his disputes with other businessmen using violence instead of in a court of law, as legal businesses do. But here is one of the less obvious ones: the number of people who drank hard liquor increased significantly during Prohibition, because it was easier to brew your own bathtub gin than it was to brew your own beer. Consequently, the alcohol was more concentrated, and more prone to harmful impurities — it put the roar in the Roaring Twenties. Are we to believe that no one suffered ill effects of drinking a product that was both more potent and more polluted?

The logical inconsistencies in our laws loom large, and we continue to ignore them. Homosexuals are not allowed to marry, but Britney Spears can get married for 55 hours, and we’re somehow protecting the institution of marriage? Serial drunk drivers kill by the carload, but we put a million people in jail for possession of weed, and we’re protecting who exactly? Our hypocrisy is sickening.

This is addressed to those who routinely mispronounce the name of my home state. Some of you, inexplicably, are from this state and you still don’t know how to pronounce it. Since you somehow managed to escape any proper instruction in its pronunciation, allow me to enlighten you. It is pronounced Mizz-oo-ree. Please note that the word ends in the letter ‘i’ and not ‘ah.’ Would you care to explain why Missouri gets special treatment? I’ve never once heard anyone say “Miss-iss-ipp-ah.” Or talk about how they had spaghett-ah for dinner. So what exactly is your problem, anyway?

I don’t mean to impugn anyone’s upbringing, or education level. I don’t think those are relevant, anyway. Our very own Senator Kit Bond, who grew up in St. Louis, went to Princeton and was a Rhodes Scholar after all, suffers from this same horrible affliction. I guess I need to write him a letter and ask why it is he can’t correctly pronounce our state’s name.

On one of my recent journeys down the Wikipedia rabbit hole — you know what I’m talking about, when you look up something in Wikipedia and one of the links on the page draws your attention, and you click on it, and then repeat until you are seventeen pages and at least a dozen knowledge domains removed from the information you came looking for — I wound up on the page for aqua regia (don’t ask) and stumbled across this interesting tidbit of history:

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.

I thought that was simply amazing and just had to pass it along.

We celebrated Father’s Day a week early this year, and spent the day with the grandparents. Dixie got me the yard cart that I’ve had my eye on for a while, and the kids benefited from this purchase as they got a mini-hayride (minus the hay) around the yard before having fun in our mini water park. It’s not Oceans of Fun, but hey, what do you want for fifteen bucks?

A year ago I wrote about the electric car from Zenn Motors that was on the verge of becoming a reality. A year later, it doesn’t appear to be any closer to real, unfortunately. I’m pretty bummed about that, but I can’t say I’m surprised. The promise of an electric car has been made and broken my entire life. Please click the picture to see an ad from Hot Rod Magazine for an electric hybrid car that GM was promising. Also, please note the ad appeared in 1969!

So yeah, electric cars are coming. Just like the flying car, the personal jet-pack, and video phones. Those technologies have been on the horizon my entire life as well, and we are no closer to them today than we were during the Johnson administration. It’s not that I’ve given up hope completely. Nissan is now taking reservations for the Leaf, the Chevy Volt is right around the corner, and of course if you have the dough, you can always drop $100K on a Tesla. So the cars are around, but you still have to ask yourself the question, why has it taken so long?

Many years ago I remember hearing about a story where someone had the battery stolen out of their car. A day or two later, a brand new car battery showed up on their doorstep, with a note apologizing. The heartfelt apology described how they were down on their luck and needed the battery to get to work to feed their 12 kids, or something along those lines, and in the envelope were two tickets to a local sporting event, to act as compensation for their trouble. The homeowners attend the sporting event, and return home to find their house robbed of all of their valuables. I’m not sure if that story is true or not — it could just be an urban legend — but today I read this story about a cruise ship employee who robbed the homes of vacationers. The moral here, of course, is to not make it public knowledge when you are going to be away from home.

But if we dig just a bit deeper into this, and acknowledge that this was a matter of personal privacy, the moral to me is, never give anyone your real address. Get a post office box and use it for everything. Because nobody needs to know where you live — that’s none of their business. Now I’ll concede that choosing this path will make your life a bit more difficult. Your dentist’s office will call you and demand your real address, claiming that too many people use post office box addresses to skip out on their bill. If you order something online and have it shipped, the company will demand a shipping address, because they have exclusive arrangements with UPS or FedEx, and they don’t ship to PO boxes. The worst one so far, though, is the DMV. The State of Missouri does not allow you to use a PO box on your driver’s license anymore. Apparently, in order to drive legally, you have to live somewhere. I called the Department of Revenue in Jefferson CIty and asked what do I do if I am homeless? Does that mean I can’t renew my license? The simple but painful answer is yes. Sorry homeless people — you can live in your car, you just can’t drive it anywhere!

Not to mention the bigger problem of what if I lose my wallet? Whoever finds it now knows where I live. What if my car is broken into and my wallet is stolen? The crook now knows where I live, and also which house the garage door remote works. Call it paranoia, but as the true story above illustrates, there are plenty of people out there looking to take advantage of this private, personal information, however they can get it, and I believe that businesses and government — most importantly government — are obligated to help us to protect it.