One of the theories I have always held dear is the notion that there’s an industry dedicated to making money out of creating problems out of thin air and then offering solutions to them. For instance, in India where I live, the usual dark skin is suddenly a horrible, career-threatening problem. But rub in Fair and Lovely ointment, and you know what? Any job you want can be yours!

A mite less transparent is something I came across recently on the net, which informed me that, as a circumcised male, I was sexually crippled and was missing out on virtually all the delights coitus had to offer. Not too surprisingly, most of these sites also provided nice helpful links to nice helpful surgeons willing and ready to reconstruct my foreskin for me and return me to sexual non-dysfunctionality.
I am an Indian. Among Indians, circumcision is (barring Muslims) exceedingly rare. As I’m not a Muslim, I wasn’t circumcised in childhood. Nor was I given any kind of instructions on genital health or hygiene; this is not surprising when you consider that almost no Asian parents ever mention the genitals, or sex, or any such thing to their children. Sex education, for instance, is banned in this country since the government has officially declared that sex comes naturally and need not be taught. As far as I know, the situation is similar in Africa. This means that in an arc stretching from Senegal to the Philippines, almost nobody gets access to proper sexual instruction, including how to care for their own genital organs.

Now, being a normal teenager, I began to have erotic dreams, and, of course, I’d have erections. One morning when I was sixteen I woke to find that my foreskin had retracted behind my glans penis; the entire glans was swollen to twice its size. This literally has to be experienced before one can understand what kind of pain it causes.

I was, naturally, mortified. I could not discuss this with my parents because they had never even spoken of sex to me, or of genital health, or anything. Besides, I was terrified of what had happened, and I was – being young and stupid – hoping it would go away by itself.

Well, it didn’t. I walked that day to school and back, as usual, three kilometers either way, and spent the day in agony so excruciating it is still clear in my memory. On the second day I summoned up the nerve to tell my dad. He did nothing much except phone his brother, a doctor, who lived several hundred kilometers away. This brother prescribed some medicines to decrease swelling and that’s all he did. He made no attempt even to tell me what was wrong with me.

By the third day I was no longer capable of walking properly, and my dad finally took me to a doctor. This man pulled the foreskin back without the benefit of anesthetic. I later discovered anesthetic is compulsory for this procedure, once the swelling is as bad as mine was. Can you imagine what I went through while he was pulling back the foreskin? No? Or would you rather not think about it?

What I had is termed paraphimosis – which nobody bothered to tell me at the time. Nobody, including this doctor, thought fit to inform me that it was a medical condition.

The swelling, of course, went down swiftly once the pressure on the glans had been removed, but it left me with a phobia of it happening again. And of course it would happen, whenever I slept and had erotic dreams, which – naturally – was something outside my control. On several occasions I woke in a panic, fumbling between my legs to pull back the foreskin before it got stuck behind the glans.

Over time, this thing led to the following problems:
I developed a phobia around falling asleep. I never slept well, and would start awake multiple times a night, afraid of what might be happening. This became a health problem as anyone who’s suffered from chronic insomnia knows.

Also, I became, literally, terrified of having an erection. Remember that I was at an age when the hormones have just begun surging, and you get the full picture. More than once I had to break off proceedings with girls at a crucial juncture because I could literally feel my foreskin shifting as I erected, and I had to rush off to the bathroom to try and pull it back – a procedure that was always extremely difficult and often painful. This, of course, ruined my chances with the lady of the moment each time. Can you imagine what it did to my sexual self-confidence to be functionally impotent in my late teens and early twenties?

Most doctors I consulted were indifferent, since according to them it wasn’t a problem; the same man who pulled back my foreskin informed me that everything would be all right “when I got married”. I only wish they’d experience what I went through, and then I’d have wanted to hear their opinion.

Finally, when I’d saved up money for the surgery, I got myself circumcised at the age of 29. I had to persuade the reluctant surgeon. “Why do you want this done at all?” he was still asking, as he was about to inject the local anesthetic to do the job. I wonder if you know what it feels like to be circumcised at that age? I’ll discuss that point in a moment.

It was however, worth it. I can sleep now and have over the years had some good sex, although my sexuality was definitely shaped by what I went through in my formative years.  

I don’t have any kids nor will I ever have any kids; but I’m a passionate advocate of early circumcision, and I believe that people who militate against it either don’t know what they’re talking about or have an ulterior motive. Certainly surgeons who promote foreskin reconstruction surgery have a motive, the most powerful one of all, Lord Mammon.

While reading up online on circumcision, I came across a lot of extremely vehement and usually somewhat incoherent anti-circumcision rhetoric. Much of the arguments against circumcision – if “arguments” is the word – can be boiled down to a few basic points:

Argument: Foreskins have a lot of useful functions. Response: Yes, foreskins evolved to protect the glans – at a time when people wore no clothing and the penis needed protecting from dust and dirt, and to be kept moist and sensitive. That is no longer true today.

Argument: Foreskins are a male baby’s birthright and having a child circumcised is depriving him of it. Response: A cleft palate or congenital hernias can also, by stretching terms only a little (and this is an argument where the other side stretches terms a lot), be considered a particular baby’s “birthright”. Doing something that may be of great benefit to the baby (see link to a medical article analyzing benefits of circumcision, below)

Argument: The circumcised penis gives much less sexual pleasure. Response: As compared to what? How do you quantify sexual pleasure? If one intends to talk about sensitivity of the penis, I can report my own experiences. After my circumcision, there was a sudden and dramatic decrease in penile sensitivity and intensity of orgasms. However, this lasted only a short while before the remaining nerves adapted. Within a year of my circumcision I could no longer detect any difference in sensitivity or orgasmic intensity. This by the way, is the number one reason put forward by Reconstructionists for why one should go in for surgical recreation of one’s foreskin.  I consider it a red herring

Argument: Circumcising babies is cruel and can cause death or penile amputation. Response: There are actually two completely different and contradictory points here. Circumcising babies can be a bloody affair because the foreskin adheres to the glans and has to be stripped away, which looks unpleasant. Anti-circumcision writers love to flaunt videos of this procedure to manipulate emotions and arouse a feeling of revulsion. In truth, it’s actually safer than the alternative which involves stretching the foreskin and blindly dividing it. This procedure can actually cause amputation of the glans. Secondly, death can’t occur from circumcision; only from failure to maintain hygiene and concomitant infections post-surgery. With proper care, death from anesthetic complications can be avoided, especially by using local anesthesia, in which case deaths are all but unknown. Of course, after using local anesthesia the child has to be strapped down to stop him moving around, which is called “cruel” by the anti-circumcisionists. None of these anti-circumcision arguments apply to children of the age of about three to five, when they are better able to handle the surgery.

Argument: Adult circumcision is NO Big Deal. Response: Since I was circumcised as an adult, I know something about this first hand. I wonder if you can comprehend the agony of glans rubbing on clothing until the nerve endings grow accustomed to the sensation. How do you like the idea of walking around the house, doing chores, and looking back to see drops of blood behind you on the floor, something that happened to me the next day? How about the itching as the wound dries, itching which feels more like a blazing fire while you were trying to work? I went through hell for a month, and purgatory for almost a year afterwards, before the last of the irritation went away.

If you are a male, I suggest the following experiment: Pull back your foreskin and rub your underwear over your glans. Get it? Now imagine that sensation over your entire glans, all the time for weeks on end…and extreme stinging and itching at the base of the glans, besides, as the wound dries.

Even the Old Testament gives recognition to the fact; Genesis 34 records Jacob’s sons massacring all the males of a city while they lay sore from their mass circumcision.

No big deal? How I wish.

Argument: Male circumcision is equivalent to female genital mutilation. Response: This is a red herring so large one might call it a red whale. The only – and declared – purpose of the horrendous practice known as female genital mutilation is to decrease or eliminate female sexual pleasure and thus keep women faithful to their partners. It is banned virtually universally (I think the lawless land of Somalia is the only nation still legally allowing the practice) but is still performed extensively by family members of unfortunate women. It has no medical benefit and the only point to be noted is that a banning of male circumcision for children would likely drive it underground like female circumcision, with similar high rates of infection, crude surgical practices, morbidity and deaths.

The corollary argument, that circumcision was meant to reduce male sexual pleasure, fails when one considers that it originated in West Africa thousands of years ago and was certainly practiced by the Ancient Egyptians,  murals from roughly 2300 BCE illustrates, show both willing and reluctant circumcision in progress.  The Hebrews most likely got the idea from them, and it spread eastwards with them while developing independently in other societies like some Australian Aboriginals.

Argument: Teaching proper genital hygiene procedures and teaching prepubescent males to masturbate will reduce the incidence of medically necessary circumcision. Response: As I said above, Asians and Africans wouldn’t dream of discussing sex or genitalia with their children. An average Indian parent would have a heart attack if told to teach his or her son how to masturbate. We live in the real world and have to adapt our responses to the conditions of the real world.

Besides, I know of at least two of my male classmates from college who suffered frenulum tears and bled heavily during their first intercourse. I also, very recently, got a panicky phone call from a close friend whose friend had just had sex for the first time and suffered a retracted foreskin which wouldn’t come back, causing exactly the problem I had.

I suspect that phimosis and paraphimosis are genetically quite common in Indians and that it’s only the sheer number of males in this hyper populated nation which masks the phenomenon. Most people here do not take their children to pediatricians, even today, and only do so in case of illness. Routine genital hygiene of either girls or boys is an unknown concept. So the pediatricians don’t bother telling the parents to clean their children’s wee-wees since the advice will certainly be ignored and more than likely scandalize the parents.

I have not so far alluded here to a famous study that concluded that circumcision can reduce the incidence of HIV since that study is controversial and needs further research before one can arrive at a conclusion. However, the other health benefits of circumcision are pretty clear, and it would be nice if those parts of the world where males are never taught how to take care of their genitals began a mass campaign.

Not that this will happen in India, at least, since hereabouts circumcision is equated with Islam and Muslims are contemptuously referred to as “cut-pricks”. I’m fairly certain that precise figures of circumcision among non-Muslims in India will never be available and any estimates will be far lower than the actual, simply because most non-Muslim males will hide their foreskin-less status.

The foreskin as a fig leaf; what could be more ironic?

Further reading:

For a medical overview of the health benefits of circumcision see-http://www.circs.org/library/wiswell/index.html

Information about penile carcinoma and circumcision-http://www.circs.org/library/dagher/index.html

For information about surgical reconstruction of foreskin-http://www.e-sthetics.com/genital/uncircumcision.html

For anti-circumcision information-http://www.circumstitions.com/index.html

http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/genesis/genesis34.htm

For information on Ancient Egyptian circumcision practices- http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/medicine.htm

For More information on paraphimosis-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphimosis

Five years after Hurricane Katrina decimated communities in two States, Louisiana and Mississippi, people are still left with distaste in their mouths over how response to our home soil disaster went down.  Listening to the buzz on the internet as well as various news outlets one begins to note that there are many minds about how the United States should be involved in other relief efforts. 

With the most recent natural disasters in Haiti claiming an estimated 23,000  and the current Chilean death estimate at 820,  I began to wonder what actual  Katrina survivors thought about the U.S. providing help to these foreign, albeit desperately poor, countries when we dropped the ball in such a big way here on our own turf. 

A quick search by any reader will find people stating things like “We should stay out of it and take care of our own.” But just as often you find, “We need to show we can do better and it doesn’t matter where we do it.”

What struck me was the fact that a huge amount of fundraising went into helping Haiti immediately.  And unlike other disasters, it didn’t slack off.  One blinding example of this is the remake of ‘We Are The World’ to benefit Haiti, which I think also was well timed to clean up Michael Jackson’s slogging name after his untimely death. 

To be fair other agencies like Bridging the Gap, which helps to provide clean water in countries in need, issued the statement that they have been in Haiti all along and will continue their efforts there, however they won’t take away from other countries who also clearly need water.  In short, they are on the ground, have always been on the ground and won’t be changing their program for a photo op.

I was still curious as to how an everyday American citizen who lived through Katrina would respond to our all out efforts to look like Mr. Big for other countries after treating Mississippi and New Orleans like rotten Step Children.  So I went and talked to one. 

Jennifer Murphy is a twenty something young woman who grew up in Gulfport, MS.  She was just looking forward to beginning college and starting out her life plans when Katrina hit.

Gulfport is about an hour and a half drive to New Orleans, depending on traffic and speed. During Katrina their family hunkered down at her Father’s home in west Gulfport and was hit by the eastern eye wall of Katrina which passed over the house they took shelter in.

She states:

“We (my mother, brother, and I) were going to stay where we were. My father called my mother the morning of the 28^th and told her that we needed to get out. My brother and I had stayed up the night before, all night, and didn’t get to bed until 7 that morning. Thirty minutes later, Mom was telling us to pack some things. We did. We were mainly concerned about water rising. We were between the beach and the bayou. So we went to Dad’s. Most people go away from storms. We sort of went toward it. But my father’s house was further from the beach.

I didn’t sleep all that day. That night, we began to feel the coming winds of Katrina and nervousness took over. I watched the news until the wind knocked out the cable. My father had a battery-powered radio and we used that to fill the silences. But then it really began and I sat on the sofa opposite the fireplace; eyes widened in horror, watching the metal curtain breathe. I kept asking my father if it was right that it was doing that. He told me a dozen times yes. The wind coming down the chimney had a hollow whistle. I was horrified and kept looking around the room, thinking they were all going to die. Nearly everyone I loved was going to die…my mom, my brother, my dad and step mom, my two sisters, my grandmother, my dog… It is what kept me awake. Everyone slept but me.

As it became worse, everyone woke. The sound of a small tornado ripping through the backyard is enough to do that—makes for one hell of an alarm clock. There was the sound of massive oaks exploding, uprooting, and snapping. And then the eye came and it was quiet. When the eye passes, winds shift. When the winds shifted, it felt like the house was going with it. The walls shook. To this day, it has been the only time I felt I was going to die along with those I love.”

In the aftermath with no help arriving she and her family decided to return to their apartment home, before the local police and military could close the roads. They went back towards what they knew and what was comfortable as we all might in a similar situation. The human instinct is to know and to try and fix, this is what they did. They had a townhouse which on their arrival they found the bottom floor received 5 ½ feet of water. The upstairs had been left untouched. She states, “We had just actually moved from another unit, which still had some of our things left in it downstairs. That unit not only received the water but a pine tree fell on what had been my bedroom.”

Some neighbors had stayed for the storm and they reported that the water from the Sound came in and met the water from the bayou and that there had been white caps moving between the buildings. Some of the apartments did not make it at all. One building was missing an outer wall. A loft apartment had been scooped out of its building. Cars were where they were not supposed to be, including hers, which became a boat and then a submarine and had moved about twenty feet to the northwest of where it had been left.

They spent eleven days there, after the storm, without electricity. They slept in their beds at night and during the day they had a makeshift tent, to protect from the heat and sun. 

“We hadn’t really many supplies; so the neighbor boy and I went out into the parking lot and spelled out what we needed in siding for the helicopters flying overhead. Our first message had been ICE. It was really hot. Not even twenty minutes later, an Air National Guard chopper landed on what had, at one time, been a putting green and motioned us over. He came with ice. We knew he’d be back, but we spelled out other things—Water, MRE—anyway. It gave the kid something to do…and me, too. After each spelling out, the same chopper would land, giving us what we had written out. Our last message in siding had been Thank You.”

Jennifer states, “I haven’t thought about the details in nearly 5 years. I will always remember though.”

Eventually, the family drifted and split up. Jennifer and her brother talked their mom into leaving. She didn’t want to leave her family and the only reason she and her brother stayed those 11 days without electricity and sanitary water had been their mother, so she could process what was lost. She finally went to Florida with her boyfriend for a while. Jennifer and her brother went back to Gulfport to their father’s, where they stayed for a several weeks until a FEMA trailer had been delivered. “We stayed on my father’s property. I had the bedroom and my brother had the couch. FEMA trailer life is not the best, but it is better than nothing.”

In speaking of FEMA like most other people who have been interviewed Jennifer states “FEMA, of course, came in with aid; but more aid came from the local military and out of state churches and groups. FEMA had been ill prepared and I haven’t much faith in them. It took weeks just to get one small trailer and that really is the only good from them. Although, the chemicals used in the manufacturing of those trailers has caused a great many to develop difficulties with their health. FEMA did send out “agents” to evaluate losses and reimburse people for what had been lost, but the checks did not amount to much. MEMA had also been involved, however I am unclear to what degree.”

Stations had been set up in various parking lots for the distribution of water, ice, and MREs. It had been tough getting to these places when your car had been drowned and those that hadn’t been were nearly running on fumes because there had been no gas left. But it was really the out of town and state volunteers who were here to help that made the biggest difference.  Some even went door-to-door making sure needs were being met. There had been one group from Alabama that found out about her mother’s and uncle’s medical conditions and brought a nurse to check their vitals and glucose levels and make sure they had their medications. It had been the military and the civilians from other states that brought the aid. So many stayed to help rebuild lives, donate clothing, food, and diapers.

She goes on to explain that they were in a fortunate position; a Naval Construction Battalion Center is in Gulfport. Keesler Air Force Base is in the next town to the east, Biloxi. There is also an Air National Guard nearby.  Not everyone who was affected was in such a fortunate place.

When asked how she thinks government agencies could have responded better Jennifer says, “FEMA and MEMA should have arrived sooner. It isn’t rocket science. A natural disaster is about to happen…um…what should we do? Seriously, it is common sense. Now, and I’m not sure where it is exactly, there is a warehouse stocked with what would be needed, if/when another Katrina crashes through”

Which begs the question, where are these stores exactly?  And what is stored?  Where does it go and who accounts for it?  Because it is clear that this was the plan on paper beforehand too and it never occurred.

Which leads to the question how prepared are we for natural disasters now?  What did we learn?  When the Earthquake hit Chile Feb 27, 2010 both Hawaii and Southern California were issued Tsunami warnings.  This put me a little on edge.  Living in California and working with an agency that cooperates with disaster response I know that a lot of talk was given to getting prepared after Katrina.  But mostly that is what it was, talk.  It is still being held up in talk groups and planning committees.  We have done little beyond rescinding a stupid law that forbade people from storing a year’s worth of food to make a difference in our preparedness for natural disaster.  Last Year’s fire season showed that.  A community in my locality full of the elderly and poor was unable even to leave the fire zone in an orderly manner, as there was only one way out of town.  Granted our Congressman Wally Herger has worked hard to advocate for a change in that dangerous situation but nothing concrete has been put into place. 

In the areas of Los Angeles and San Diego where Tsunami warnings were issued scads of stupid people headed towards the ocean to check it out instead of packing up for Palm Springs or someplace else inland for a couple of days.  And let us not forget Los Angeles has a huge homeless population both in Venice Beach and in the downtown area both of which would be affected by a possible Tsunami. 

This question of the poor, the forgotten the insane leads me directly to the problems facing countries like Chili and Haiti.  These are countries whose disaster toll was greater than it needed to be due to the fact that people there were poor.  Pictures coming out Haiti show buildings collapsed that with a little bit of rebar would have held.  It is striking that on an island that measures 29,530 sq mi (76,483 sq km), the Dominican Republic which has long been supported by the U.S. and hence has more resources suffered a lot less damage. 

It was also somewhat unsettling to see movie stars rushing off in their airplanes to save the day, church groups kidnapping children under the guise of help and unscrupulous corporations scooping in using a disaster to get a foot hold on nation rebuilding.  Let’s not forget these are the same people who have turned a blind eye to child slavery in Haiti even when it was painfully clear it has been occurring for well over 20 years and people were asking for help. (See BBC report)

Back to the U.S.’s natural disaster named Katrina, I was wondering what a survivor thought about the massive amount of money, celebrity and response being poured into other countries.  As I said, I had been picking up buzz, albeit not from areas that had recently been through any natural disasters, that we should be more concerned with the care of our own. 

In true southern survival style, my interviewee Jennifer Murphy put it this way. “So much had been lost because of Katrina and all can be replaced but the lives and the historical. This is my home and even still it is unrecognizable to me, when I’m driving along the beach. I used to navigate by landmarks. I can’t do that anymore. It’s like a different place. Seeing and living through Katrina, I cannot imagine what the Haitians are going through. It is beyond my understanding. Katrina ranked high on the destruction scale, but not that high.”

One of the things living through something does for a person, (hopefully) is to give them compassion and Jennifer’s statement certainly exemplifies that.  

She went on to say, “Haiti and Chile need help like anyone else does. Yes, the government does need to do more for their own here; but Haiti and Chili may not have what we have. We have our neighboring states. We have greathearted individuals who come together and stay months in a place ravaged by extreme winds and high water in order to rebuild homes, churches, and schools, even businesses. FEMA fell a bit short pre-Katrina, during Katrina, and post-Katrina; but our neighbors didn’t.”

It is this mindset that does give hope, our neighbors don’t fall short, and neither should we.  In fact we are nowhere close to done with our work in Haiti.  In 2008 Oxfam issued a report sighting the problems likely to affect Haiti due to climate change.  These problems were mostly due to increases in hurricanes.  Hispaniola lies directly in Hurricane alley and Haiti in particular has been the victim of deforestization, setting up a scenario for bad mudslides before this earthquake.  The earthquake and its resulting damage add to the likelihood that Haiti is only at the beginning of its natural disaster woes. 

Line 17 of Oxfam’s recommendations for Haiti was as follows:

Rich countries that have

Caused current global warming have

The responsibility and the capability

To deliver the bulk of funds in order

To redress the international injustice

At the heart of climate changes.

International adaptation finance will

Be needed to enable a wide range

Of measures, from community-led

Initiatives and disaster risk reduction

Strategies to long-term national

Planning and social protection in the

Face of unavoidable impacts. Climate

Change now has to be integrated

Across all development policy.

These recommendations were made in 2008 and clearly were not affectively implemented which goes to show as always we wait until it is too late to respond to what we know is eventual. 

It is this behavior that has to change.  It is the same behavior that was responsible for our own problems with Katrina  Several years prior to Katrina the city planners of New Orleans clearly mapped out the problems with the city’s failing Levee system they made recommendations to repair them, but the motion was struck down as being too expensive and the disaster unlikely to occur. 

How long are we as human beings going to behave like we can ignore the issue of climate change and infrastructure problems?  How many communities and Countries are going to be affected?  How late are we going to show up to the game? 

 When Atlantis sinks? 

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/climate_change/downloads/oi_report_climate_change_haiti_gathering_storm_en_301109.pdf

 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/extreme_events/munich_workshop/workshop_info.html

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8393085.stm

 http://www.bridgingthegap.org/

March 2008, Photobucket decided that showing bare behinds was nudity and threatened the safety and security of users… even if they were BABY pictures. Front-line staff manager and corporate trainer Monica M. Massad did finally concede and make allowances for baby pictures, but evidently the hearts of the moderators are so filthy and corrupt that they assume everyone lusts in their hearts when they see baby pictures.  After all, why else would they look at a nude baby picture and deem it pornography? We seem to be heading toward the point where nothing will be considered art and even such things as exposed navels will be deemed vile and repulsive. Heaven forbid should someone post a picture of someone wearing a bathing suit. You might think that Photobucket is owned by Jerry Falwell’s Ministries.

You wouldn’t be far off the mark.  Photobucket in fact is owned by the Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the same company that owns MySpace.  Yes, Rupert Murdoch, the same man who owns Fox News… the network that pushes hate, fear, and ignorance to its viewers and supports the Christian Right and its “holy war” against the Muslim race; the same man who owns News International, the British arm of Murdoch’s News Corp. which publishes the News of the World, and was criticized by U.K. lawmakers for their illegal wiretaps, which they call “hacking.”

Rupert Murdock has long been known for cozying up to fundamentalists. It was his take-over of Fox Network that changed the course of programming in that start up Network from Gen. X hilarity to “Family Friendly” programming.

Rupert Murdock, most recently, has been criticized for his business affiliations with Saudi Prince Al-Waleed, who incidentally is Prince of a country which fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were citizens of. What makes this tidbit of information interesting is that Murdock’s Fox News has made so many references to the evils of 9/11 and the evils of Islam. Add Fox News’ support for the large oil corporations, include some inside information of a large oil company bribing Iran to hold the hostages in the Middle East until after the election where President Carter was defeated;  this information may give 9/11 New World Order conspiracy theories some credibility. Some insight into the inside information held by this reporter can be alluded to by the quote from Mark Danner’s blog in The New Yorker:

Danner writes, “a series of delaying tactics … by the Iranian Parliament stymied all attempts by the Carter Administration to act on the hostage question … before Election Day.”

Murdoch seems to like joining forces with religious extremists, first Christian right extremists, now Muslim extremists. He is buying his way to controlling more American media and threatening to cut off any rational thinking from media airwaves. Should we have given the conspiracy theorists a little more credence?

As if this weren’t enough, Rupert Murdoch’s madness seems to be spreading to other networks as well. Perhaps it’s because they feel the need to compete in the ratings, but if so, what happens to any shred of truth left in our media?

On February 18^th, there was a breaking news story from CNN that said this:

“Plane crashes into building”

The building was in Austin, TX.  The reporter was making the attempt to link it to 9/11 by leading with questions to direct the interview toward a 9/11 scenario. He was trying to make a frightening story of terrorism out of the incident. As it turns out the case had to do with a disgruntled individual behind on their taxes with anarchist leanings.
With FOX News recently winning its court battle that allows it, and subsequently all other news stations, to misinform, or in layman’s terms lie, on its “news coverage” is CNN trying to be the new FOX News? Are the other stations soon to follow? Does this mean that U.S. citizens will no longer be able to get news that relies on facts and will only get news that’s hype?

Jane Akre and her husband Steve Wilson, former employees of FOX-owned-and-operated station WTVT in Tampa, Florida, sued FOX under the Florida whistle-blower law and were awarded   $425,000 for which FOX counter-sued. It was determined in court that WTVT’s (Fox) argument that the FCC’s policy against the intentional falsification of the news — which the FCC has called its “news distortion policy” — does not qualify as the required “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102. [...] Because the FCC’s news distortion policy is not a “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102

Only FoxBGHsuit.com, InjuryBoard.com, ThirdWorldTraveler.org, CeaseSPIN.org, Purefood.com, Relfe.com, SourceWatch.org, OrganicConsumers.org, TheCorporation.com, and DailyKos.com and a couple others even reported on the FOX lawsuit. Not one of the major media outlets covered the story at all. The Daily Kos quoted the following:

“During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so.”

Evidently, CNN was paying attention and decided to do some FOXy coverage of its own. Most likely many viewers could probably easily spot the hype, but how many others were scared needlessly by this type of coverage? How long will it be before the other U.S. television news stations follow suit and decide to do some FOXy coverage of their own simply for the sake of ratings? With jobs and pay declining, prices rising, homes being foreclosed on by the very banks for which the taxpayers are now footing the bills of their bail-outs, how many more of these types of incidents will we see? How much father will Murdoch’s Madness spread?

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/02/18/vo.tx.plane.hits.building.news8austin?iref=allsearch

http://www.philly2philly.com/politics_community/politics_community_articles/2009/6/29/4854/fox_news_wins_lawsuit_misinform_public

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/30/201231/262

http://www.cnet.com.au/photobucket-u-turns-on-nude-baby-picture-ban-339286836.htm?omnRef=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fclient%3Dopera%26rls%3Den%26q%3Dnude%2Bphoto%2Bsharing%2Bsite%26sourceid%3Dopera%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61N2W820100224

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/02/06/saudi.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,44865,00.html

http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/84

A tort is an action taken by one person, either intentionally or negligently, that harms another person. They normally include actions that are not covered by a contract or by any statute. Ever since there was a way to lodge a grievance against one’s neighbor, someone who believes he has been harmed by someone else has been able to sue the wrongdoer for damages caused by the wrongful act. Tort lawsuits make the news most often, even though they are by no means the majority of suits filed.  We can’t help but whistle in amazement when we hear of the multi-million dollar awards that juries allow in the most egregious cases.

 What Do Damages Cover?

Nothing can give back the things these victims of negligence have lost: the diminished income because of time away from work; the unmarred face that existed before an unleashed dog mauled a four year old girl; the mother who was killed by a drunk driver; living without constant pain caused by the injuries in an accident; the cheerful contributions to her family that the coma patient used to make before the doctor ignored the pulmonary thrombosis that led to her vegetative state.

Whether it’s a car accident, a doctor who ignores symptoms, or a vicious dog that attacks a child, the person who is hurt should not have to pay the price for the injury.  They pay for other people’s negligence in ways that sometimes are horrific. The legal system has evolved ways to compensate these people for the difficult changes brought on by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or by trusting their care to someone who proved to be untrustworthy.

Once liability for wrongdoing is established, the person committing the wrong, known in legal circles as the tortfeasor, must pay for pain and suffering when someone is injured badly enough to merit such a payment. Pain and suffering is impossible to quantify on any objective scale.  Think of damages for pain and suffering to be the price the injured person charges the wrongdoer for what he has gone through. How much money would it take for you to voluntarily suffer from whiplash? How much money would make you willing to suffer brain damage? What is your price for being in a coma for the last twenty years of your life? For losing an arm? For losing your sight?

Tort Reform Equals Medical Malpractice Lawsuit Reform 

Tort reformers like to claim that medical malpractice lawsuits are frivolous, brought by money-hungry lawyers who are so unethical as to sue for any perceived slight, no matter how small, and whose greedy clients are looking to win Legal Lotto. It is no accident that the insurance industry leads the battle charge into tort reform.

Unfortunately, “tort reform” usually means “medical malpractice lawsuit reform.” People think that greedy, pit-bull lawyers are mean to gentle, caring, well-meaning doctors, who are just doing their best to heal people who probably can’t be healed in the first place.

That is not the case.

A Harvard Medical Practice Study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 concluded that tort litigation claiming medical malpractice only “infrequently compensates patients injured  by medical negligence and rarely identifies, and holds providers  accountable for, substandard care.” To give that statement some perspective, the study reported that “of the 280 patients who had adverse events caused by medical negligence as defined by the study protocol, 8 filed malpractice claims.” Eight claims out of nearly three hundred instances of medical malpractice would not seem to be such an outrageous amount that the court system or even doctors are being overwhelmed by frivolous lawsuits. On the contrary, when only 2.8% of people with valid claims actually make them, one would tend to think that these suits are under-represented in the court system, not overwhelming it.

Frivolous claims?

The situation is not appreciably different now.  The results of a study done by the Harvard School of Public Health in conjunction with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 2006.  A team of physicians reviewed a random sample of 1,452 medical malpractice claims to determine whether a medical injury had occurred, and if so, whether it was due to medical error.  A little over one-third of the cases had either no errors or no medical injury at all, according to the reviewing doctors. Of those that had no errors or injuries, damages were paid to the alleged victim in only 16% of the cases. Sixteen percent of the cases approximately one-third of the claims that were non-meritorious means that less than six percent of the total claims that resulted in money paid out by the insurer should not have been. That means that when someone brings a claim that is frivolous or which otherwise does not merit compensation, he is not likely to get anything for his efforts – and neither will his attorney.

What about cases that were meritorious, cases in which there was an identifiable medical injury due to medical error? The study found that of those cases, which were about two thirds of the cases in the random sample, there were 27% fewer claims paid than should have been. The cases err in favor of the insurance companies and contrary to the interests of those who have been injured.

The numbers don’t lie. 16% of non-meritorious claims get paid anyway; 27% of valid claims go unpaid. Twenty seven percent of people who are injured by their doctors’ negligence are not compensated, much less given extravagant awards meant to deter future negligence.

The Insurance Angle

Any insurance salesman will tell us that insurance is necessary; it is no longer an option. Insurance preys on our fears of the future combined with our experience of Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong will, at the worst possible time, and will cost more money than we can ever hope to have on hand.  Our insurance companies tell us that they are there to make sure that we are not bankrupted by our own negligent conduct toward someone else. Our insurance company is supposed to pay for the actual harm done: the damage to property, the medical bills incurred by someone injured by our actions, the time the person had to be off work and could not contribute to his family’s support, and similar quantifiable amounts.

Truthfully, though, no insurance company is in the business of paying claims. Instead, they look for any and every way possible not to pay claims. And no insurance company is in danger of going bankrupt because it has paid more claims than it has collected in premiums.

Medical malpractice litigation is especially contentious. The medical profession and its insurers have successfully lobbied in several states for shorter statutes of limitations, special notice filings required before litigation may be brought, and additional proof submitted with new filings to substantiate claims. Tighter restrictions and more requirements make filing medical malpractice claims less likely and more costly. Victims have a more difficult time getting into court in the first place.

For example, in 2003 Texas’s Governor Rick Perry spearheaded medical malpractice tort reform that capped non-economic damages at $250,000 per defendant, or up to $750,000 per incident. There is no cap on quantifiable economic damages, such as lost wages or cost of present and future medical care. In an Op-Ed piece last summer in the Washington Examiner Perry declared that malpractice insurance rates in Texas had declined as much as 27% in Texas after these reforms were put into place.

Premiums fall, and doctors are happier. No one likes to pay insurance premiums. Health insurance premiums, and their affordability, are at the heart of the current health care reform being debated so hotly in congress.

Damages as Punishment

Despite the difficulty of quantifying pain and suffering, the damages this article has so far described are compensatory in nature. They compensate the victim for something. The money replaces his car, pays for the surgery to remove the hemostats left in his abdomen by the last surgeon, fixes his broken jaw, reimburses him for lost wages for the time he was off work, pays the value of life that was lost when someone was negligently killed.  These damages are meant to make the victim of the tort whole again, not to enrich him. They are intended to put him in the place he was before the tort occurred, and to allow him to go forward without harm to his finances, to heal him both literally and financially.

Tort reform does not address compensatory damages. Tort reform is primarily aimed at capping what its proponents see as excessive jury awards in particularly awful cases. Such awards are not compensatory in nature, but punitive. Punitive damages don’t reimburse someone for money they are out. That is the province of compensatory damages. Instead, punitive damages are intended as punishment – hence, the name “punitive.” Such punishment is levied when there is gross negligence or something beyond simple inattention or carelessness. The bigger and more preventable the screw-up, the more likely punitive damages are to be awarded.

Why Punish a Mistake?

Why would someone require punishment for a screw-up? Think about how we decide how and whether to punish our children for negligence. Let’s say that Susie and Jenny are at a birthday party for one of their classmates and its cake and ice cream time. Susie gets excited explaining something and throws her arms wide, knocking over Jenny’s glass of punch, spilling it on her and ruining her party dress. Of course, Susie has to apologize to Jenny, and she has to get Jenny another glass of punch. She has to help clean up the mess, and if Jenny’s party dress is expensive Susie’s mom might offer to pay for it to be cleaned. These actions are compensatory in nature. They compensate Jenny for the loss of her glass of punch, her clean and dry dress, and her hurt feelings.

If Susie knocks the punch over because she was dancing on the table, though, Susie will be punished. Punitive action will be taken to ensure she doesn’t dance on the table and spill someone’s punch again.  Maybe we put Susie in time-out. Maybe Susie gets a spanking. Maybe Susie is grounded from her Barbies, or she is not allowed to go to any parties for the next month. The point is not that Susie is being punished for doing something intentionally. She did not. She did spill the punch while being grossly negligent, though. She should have known that if she danced on the table where Jenny’s punch sat, the punch would spill.

Punitive damages are intended to stop gross negligence. They are not appropriate where there is no gross negligence – where the punch spills accidentally due to something unforeseen or where the negligence was minor. Punitive damages are for those egregious cases, for instance those in which the doctor ignored clear warning signs of his patient’s impending doom and did nothing.

Punitive damages are not awarded lightly by any jury. If a jury awards an amount in the millions, it is because the defendant in that lawsuit has the resources to pay such an amount, even if it hurts. Punishment is not intended to kill, and punitive damages that bankrupt a company or a doctor are never appropriate. Punitive damages are supposed to hurt, though – just like being grounded from birthday parties hurts. And just like Susie, the idea is that punitive damages will hurt for a little while, but the defendant will get over it – hopefully to go forth more carefully in the future.

How Punitive Damages are Determined

The idea behind tort reform is that without caps on punitive damages set by law, the sky is the limit.  Any lawyer who wants to collect the award his client has been given by the jury knows that is not true. Punitive damages cannot bankrupt the tortfeasor. If the tortfeasor is bankrupt, the punitive damage award gets discharged and will never be paid.

The net worth of the tortfeasor is always an issue. In July 2000, when that Florida jury awarded$144.8 billion in class action lawsuit brought against cigarette manufacturers, the wealth of the cigarette manufacturers was an issue along with their intentional actions that caused the harm complained of. The press was aghast at the size of the award, wondering if the tobacco companies could possibly pay that amount. Ten years later the tobacco companies are still in business and still selling cigarettes. They may even still claim that smoking doesn’t really cause cancer.  Were they punished enough to correct their behavior?

Twenty years ago conventional wisdom placed the amount of pain and suffering at three times the amount of compensatory damages. Juries’ awards for pain and suffering, as well as for punitive damages, are all over the map. There is no consistency to them. The argument of the lawyers seems to be the determining factor. The more silver-tongued the lawyer, the higher the award, which results in the erratic awards we see today. There are extremely high awards and awards that aren’t so high. Sometimes punitive damages are not awarded at all.  Other times the award seems astronomical.  One aspect of the tort reform movement proposes rules by which punitive damages might be awarded.

Damages by Formula

In his article, “How Should Punitive Damages Work?” Harvard educated law professor Dan Markel of the Florida State University College of Law proposes that juries be instructed in how to assess “extra compensatory” damages. He divides punitive damages into three categories, all of which should be considered. One amount should accomplish “retributory justice,” and should be assessed against tortfeasors whose conduct is found by the jury to be malicious or reckless. If the conduct that caused the harm was neither malicious nor reckless, retributive damages would not be appropriate. In Markel’s proposal, juries would have a “chart of reprehensibility” to establish these damages meant for retributive justice. They would decide on a scale of one to twenty just how malicious or reckless the behavior was, and award damages according to a state-mandated chart. A portion of the damages would go to the injured person and a portion of the punitive damages would go to the state. The purpose of these damages would be to make the defendant tortfeasor worse off than if the harmful action had not occurred.

Next, Markel says, the jury should consider the harm to the victim’s personal dignity. Injuries to personal dignity that would qualify for this type of money would occur only when the tortfeasor’s malicious conduct was directly aimed at diminishing the victim’s dignity. Cases involving slander come to mind immediately. Even corporations can engage in this behavior: think of the employer who makes the employee so miserable that he quits, but not before his professional reputation is ruined and he lands in a psychiatrist’s office because of the way he has been treated at work.

Markel’s third aspect of punitive damages is an amount intended to deter future similar conduct by the tortfeasor. He gives a formula based on how likely the tortfeasor was to escape liability for his reprehensible action. The more likely the tortfeaasor was to get away with what it did, the higher the damage award. For instance, a company fires an employee for failing a drug test which the employee never took, then fabricates evidence to claim that the employee not only took the drug test but failed it. The tortfeasor took steps to avoid liability, and to deter it from trying to cover up such lapses in the future, deterrence damages are awarded.

State Reforms

Different states have different standards for punitive damages. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia allow punitive damages in medical malpractice cases. Some have caps on the punitive damage award and some do not.  Only five states prohibit all punitive damages, no matter how egregious the tortfeasor’s conduct.

As noted above, Texas has already capped damages at $350,000, no matter the wealth of the tortfeasor. South Carolina’s legislature is currently in session considering whether caps on punitive damages ought to be put in place. H3489 would limit punitive damages to three times the compensatory damages or $350,000, whichever is less. While this seems like a lot of money, would it serve to deter a tort done by Microsoft, the tobacco companies, or a hospital with plenty of insurance coverage?  Alabama allows three times the amount of the compensatory damages, or $500,000, whichever is greater, with larger amounts for certain cases and caps of 10% of a small business’s net worth.

Case law in Connecticut has limited punitive damages to the actual cost of the litigation, including the attorney’s fee. This is the so-called “English Rule,” which means that the loser of a lawsuit pays the entire attorney’s fees and costs of litigation. The English Rule is intended to deter frivolous suits and litigation that is more expensive than whatever is recovered.

Kentucky has no limits at all on damages, and § 54 of its Constitution states unequivocally: “The General Assembly shall have no power to limit the amount to be recovered for injuries resulting in death or for injuries to person or property.”

What’s the Answer?

Punitive damages serve a purpose. Erratic awards are indeed a fact of litigation. But some conduct is so reprehensible that it needs to be punished and punished severely. Punitive damages are not intended to compensate the victim, even though the victim will receive all or a part of the award. They are intended for the purpose the name implies: punishment.

Used the right way, punitive damages in all cases, not just medical malpractice cases, are intended to punish and deter future bad behavior. Caps on punishment without regard for the wealth of the tortfeasor or its ability to pay cannot be effective punishment because just like with children, the punishment needs to be tailored to fit both the offense and the wrongdoer. Punitive damages of $350,000 against a small boutique will drive it out of business; the same amount awarded to a victim to be paid by Wal-Mart will never be missed by such a huge company.

Punitive damages are meant to punish. Artificial caps on awards do not take into account the ability of the tortfeasor to pay, and their deterrent effect can be extinguished by awards that are too small.  Tort Reform must proceed carefully and with these precepts in mind, or the entire purpose of punitive damages will be negated and bad behavior will go unpunished.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2057025

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/michelle-mello/files/litigation.pdf

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Tort-reform-must-be-part-of-health-care-reform-8096175.html#ixzz0hDdpXgNY

http://www.pennumbra.com/issues/pdfs/157-5/Markel.pdf

http://www.scstatehouse.gov/cgi-bin/query.exe?first=DOC&querytext=3489&category=Legislation&session=118&conid=5348313&result_pos=0&keyval=1183489

http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/alcode/6/11/2/6-11-20

Morning.

“No time like the present,” he thought. He took the handheld from his satchel, and pressed the first button.Pressing the last one, he stepped through.

He materialized, not in his lab, but in a rather strange-looking building. It was more like a – warehouse? – than a laboratory; his machine, a little the worse for what appeared to be age, was sitting in a corner. He marveled that the power was still on; the floor was dusty, and the control-panel had a cover over it.

Within a few seconds, two men walked into the room. Their clothing was somewhat-different than what he’d considered ‘modern’, but not terribly so.

The first one spoke. “Where did you come from?”

Jamieson looked at their hands and belts. No weapons – at least, none that he could identify.
“From the past,” he said. It was only then that he realized that the conversation had begun and was continuing in Latin.

The elder of the two grew wide-eyed. “You are – the Viator?”

Jamieson smiled. “I could be considered thus. I built this machine.  Tell me – what is the date?”

“It is now the year 2,798, from the founding of the Republic. My name is Titus. My associate’s name is Lucas. We are from the Collegium Boreooccidentalis. We – and those for two generations before us – have kept your machine running constantly in anticipation of your return.”

Rome ruled the world.

“Come with us,” said the older man.

Jamieson walked with the two out into the sunlight. His first suspicions were correct. This was a warehouse; actually an archeological repository. They were in a large courtyard, with expansive walking-paths and large white buildings, devoid of the ornamentation from the earlier eras of his travels.

Overhead, what appeared to be a train moved silently – there was no motive power present, and no support mechanism. Jamieson’s mouth must have been open, because the younger man said, “It’s our main means of transportation. It’s called a GravTrain.”

Jamieson snickered. He thought it sounded far too much like a dog-food that was popular when he was young.

“Is something funny?” The older man looked puzzled.

“No, not at all. It’s just that there are many things which don’t translate well from my prior language.”

“There are many who will want to study your memories; your knowledge of What Was, and especially your language.”

Jamieson smiled. True research.

“There is much I’d like to know in return. For example, you must have kept my machine running from the time you discovered it. When was that?”

“This part of NovaRoma was explored in the Year 1873AUC. The learned men who accompanied the journey down the NovaTiber journeyed north, and discovered your machine quite by accident.

It was fortunate that the building remained intact – the fact that it was in a basement certainly helped. They realized immediately that it had some value to a former civilization, and it was preserved first by the decree of the Governor, and then by the Emperor himself.”

The elder man continued, “We could not adequately translate the language – and although we believed it to be a hybridized form of the languages spoken by the Allemeni, the Britons, and the Saxons, those languages died out some 1,800 years ago, and there were no records.”

Jamieson sucked wind. He was here by blind luck.

“So, when did you figure out what it was?”, said Jamieson.

“As time went on, our technology improved. We were capable of understanding the physics of the thing only recently – within the past two hundred years. It took another hundred to develop a power-source which would operate it. Did you really run everything on hydrocarbon-based electricity?”

“Well, yes – we did.” Jamieson looked more and more incredulous. “What is your main power source here?”

“We operate most things from methane and hydrogen. We discovered back about 1,000 years ago that hydrocarbons were destroying our breathable air, so hydrocarbons as fuel were banned, along with fireplaces, as we were beginning to denude our forests. It just made sense to look for something else.”

They arrived at a building where there were long tables and staff scurrying about, carrying trays of food. A communal dining-room, much like the one at the Institute.

Over a lunch which was decidedly Mediterranean, Jamieson learned that the Imperium had developed over the years into a benevolent-dictatorship of sorts; that electrically-generated hydrogen or biomass-methane powered nearly everything – but that the native peoples of North America had been exterminated by the legions and smallpox. There were remnants of artifacts in some of the museums, but that was it. Rome and resistant cultures never got along; cultures which could be assimilated, were.

“Some things never change,” Jamieson thought.

After registering as a citizen of NovaRoma (anyone living within their borders were citizens; it was true in his world courtesy of Caracalla, and it was true here, also), he was shown to temporary quarters. He’d be assigned a home later.

“Assigned?”

“Yes. The Imperium determines where everyone will live.”

Jamieson’s face froze. He asked the question that had been on his mind since arrival: “What about personal freedom?”

His two hosts looked confused. “What?”, said the older man.

The younger one, who’d done a bit more study in philosophy, said “Freedom, as you call it, is allowed only to the extent that it does not interfere with the common good. So said Aurelius; so we live today.” That last statement sounded like rote.

“I see.”, said Jamieson. He turned to walk with the two men, signaling that this conversation was over.
“Here we are.”, said the older man. “We will see you on the morrow.”

Jamieson walked through an expansive doorway. He was greeted immediately by another man; almost a carbon-copy of Old Titus, as Jamieson was starting to call him mentally. “We’ve been expecting you! Come this way.”

Jamieson walked with the man. “You’ll get your registration-cell tomorrow,” said the Caretaker, tapping a slight bump on his wrist. “I’ll check you in and out here myself tonight. Breakfast is at the third hour. Don’t be late.” He showed Jamieson to the lift; a noiseless apparatus which appeared not unlike the elevators he’d used in his old life.

“Old life,” thought Jamieson.

He had much to learn.

____________________________________

Breakfast was a rather bland porridge-concoction; he’d inquired about meat, and was told that it was not available during breakfast for medical reasons. Somehow, the building’s Caretaker’s tone was much like that of a principal scolding a schoolboy.

Jamieson learned more that morning and into the afternoon.

Population was strictly controlled. Permits – exhaustive amounts of paper – had to be generated before a couple could have a child. Asia had overpopulated itself, and was suffering from the inevitable after effects – in fact, the Imperium was considering invading China to bring Asia into its orbit, and put an end to their resource-consumption.

Food was rationed – no one was hungry; no one was fat. There was no such thing as food prepared in the home, save for that for very young children – literally, homes and apartments didn’t have extensive kitchens – save for a very handful of people who were wealthy. “Wealth” was a relative term, also – there weren’t the new-reality versions of Gates or Buffet running around.

On balance, Jamieson felt better than he had in a long time – everyone walked everywhere, and when the weather turned bad, there was the Underground – a subterranean version of the GravTrain (that term still made him laugh) he’d seen earlier.

The train-in-the-sky was a marvel, really – each car was brought down to the platform, loaded, then reelevated and connected to the powered-engine. The procedure was reversed when it got where it was going – and it went everywhere in this “New Seattle” (as Jamieson called it to himself). It was certainly better than the old Monorail.

Later that afternoon, he walked with Lucas, the younger man, in an expansive park which was roughly where downtown Seattle would have been.

The first thing he noticed were the songbirds.

They were everywhere; in the trees; on the expansive lawns; congregating near the ponds. Having not logged the forests, and having not introduced pollution into the environment, the park was alive with birds. Hummingbirds darted everywhere, looking for flowers; Grosbeaks and Orioles took wing from tree to tree; species which were extinct in Jamieson’s other reality.

They continued walking, and discussing the way things were. There was, for instance, no slavery in the Imperium – they’d abolished it centuries ago as their technology improved. Assimilating the slaves as productive wage-earners was the impetus for the hybrid socialist/monetarist system they now ‘enjoyed’.

Every city had its own amphitheatre (most had several, actually), and while gladiatorial games were an embarrassment of the past, they now hosted everything from music and theatre to a form of football.

There was much to like about this new, clean place. But a few things were missing.

“Know what I miss?”, said Jamieson. “A burger.”

“A what?”, said Lucas.

“A burger. Meat. Onions. Tomatoes.”

“I can’t imagine that would be good for you, sir.” Lucas was a bit appalled.

“I also miss potato chips. More than I thought I would.”

“I have never heard of such things, Sir. How are they made?”

Jamieson began by telling Lucas about the concept of a burger-stand, when they reached the western end of the park. What got Jamieson’s attention was the screaming.

He looked to his left, and saw a man in a set of stocks; his head and hands protruding through the holes in the thick wood.

He was being flogged.

Jamieson froze. “What is all this?”

Lucas began to explain. “You must understand. From what you’ve told us about your own reality, and from what we experienced as an Imperium in the Early Days, the Law was a convoluted mess. Appeals, endless arguments, other such. Now, we have three punishments for any crime save murder, rape, or treason. There aren’t many real crimes – we leave interpersonal relationships alone unless they involve money. This man likely either stole something or defrauded someone. He’s getting ten lashes.”

Almost on cue, the man in the stocks gargled his next scream, then vomited copiously. This explained why there was a fence in front of the stocks to keep the crowd at a distance.

Parents had their children with them – as an object-lesson and behavioral influence, no doubt. Other people either gasped or cheered at the man’s loss of both control and personal dignity.

“We find that allowing the public to witness corporal punishment has a deterrent effect,” said Lucas.

Jamieson continued to walk; the sunset beckoned, and what would have been called Puget Sound in his time was beautiful on a late summer day, as this was.

Lucas continued, “A second offence of any sort is met by a sentence of twenty-five lashes.”

“What do they do for a third? Kill him?” Jamieson was incredulous.

“Oh, no, sir! We abolished the death penalty back in 2200AUC. That we found had no deterrent effect. The final sentence is Transportation.”

“Transportation?” Jamieson was envisioning prison ships to Australia – or whatever they called it now.

“Yes. There are several colonies, in the center of NovaRoma, where the land is nice and flat. They’re guarded by the trackless wastes; we don’t even really need legions to guard them, although there’s a garrison near each one.”

“And what do these ‘colonies’ do?”

“They house troublemakers,” said Lucas. “The inmates run the colonies. The average newcomer lives about a month, unless they have a special skill that can be used to support the colony – metalworking, gardening, farming, and the like. Most city-dwellers don’t last long there.”

“How long do these sentences last?”, asked Jamieson, fearing the worst.

“For as long as they live.”, said Lucas. “We’ve determined that changing people’s behavior is usually not possible. The best way to deal with such is to isolate people from society who have exhibited a lack of either ability or desire to live within it.”

“I wonder what they do with the physically or mentally challenged,” thought Jamieson.

_______________________________________

Later, in his room, Jamieson reflected on what he’d learned.

He’d been right – and wrong. Just how that could be was beyond him, but he was living in a reality which flogged people in public for stealing grapes, and sent them to a – penal colony? – for a third offense, no matter how small.

There was, on balance, very little crime – in fact, NovaRoma (what in his world had been the United States, Canada, and the northern part of Mexico) hadn’t seen a murder in over a year, and lesser crimes were not all that common – not with the stocks or a trip to the center of the continent awaiting anyone who fell out of line. There was no graffiti, no littering, no broken windows, no theft.

You ate what was available in the communal dining rooms – and, Jamieson had to admit – it was good – but while everyone was clean, healthy, and well-fed, there was no freedom of choice. No drug-abuse; cholesterol; tobacco – no alcohol save wine and beer.

No one smoked. There were no butts on the sidewalks; no ‘smoking or non smoking’ – and virtually no lung disease. Cancer was 1/10th of what it had been in his world.

Everyone had a piece of the pie; the Imperium had discovered long ago that this – and not repression – was the best way to guarantee order. Give everyone what they need, and trouble vanishes.

In truth, if this wasn’t the best way to live in harmony with nature and the environment – and to care for large groups of people the best way possible – it was close. Creativity was encouraged – indeed; it thrived here and in all of the other corners of the Empire (the inevitable result of not having to worry about your next meal); Roman commerce brought goods from all over the known world to this little corner of what had been North America- and life was good, indeed.

There was something missing, though.

The freedom to be a fool.

There were no street-performers. No mad preachers with ‘the end is near’ on a sandwich-board. No fool-kids on skateboards with Moms telling them that they’d ‘break their necks, someday’. Even entertainment was prescribed (or proscribed) by the Imperium.

“Not everyone is an intellectual,” thought Jamieson. “Not everyone wants order.”

That, as he analyzed it, was the other thing he missed.

The delightful chaos of life.

“What have I done?”, he thought. “What have I done?”

_____________________________

The next time Jamieson awoke, he wasn’t in NovaRoma.  He was fighting the effects of anaesthetic. The nurse fetched a police-detective, who was just down the hall.

“Dr. Jamieson?”

“Yeah,” said Jamieson, still sodden with sleep.

“I’m Detective Knudson of the Seattle P.D.” Knudson showed Jamieson a badge, which he didn’t bother to read – it wouldn’t have been any use, anyway, and this Knudson-fellow couldn’t have gotten past the door unless he’d been secured at the front-desk, anyhow.

“I suppose you want to know why Kelso shot me.”

“That’d be a good first step. Next, I’d like you to tell me where we can find him.”

Jamieson laughed – and winced; his shoulder reminding him that a 9MM had shattered his shoulderblade a few hours before. He was still trying to recover from the dream, also.

“Kelso’s likely in plain sight. Not one to do this sort of thing – he’s probably home, waiting for you, if he’s anywhere. Maybe down by the water, watching the tugs come through the locks, or up at Seattle Center, wishing for the Future We Never Had. Have you tried his office?” Jamieson was starting to feel something else – irritation and anger.

“Dr. Jamieson, that’s the odd thing. We’ve looked everywhere – and I mean everywhere. Dr. Kelso is gone. Not just missing – gone. We were sort of wondering if you knew if he had any enemies – because his wallet, keys – everything, in fact – are right where he left them.”

“That son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Jamieson.

“Come again?’, said Knudson.

“That son-of-a-BITCH!” This time, Jamieson was forceful; shouting almost. “He went and DID it!”

The nurse was there by this time; gently restraining Jamieson, who could go nowhere in any event.
“Now, Doctor,” she said, the last word coming hard for her – she viewed Jamieson and his ilk as not-really-doctors; not the kind she respected, anyway – “You’ll pull your stitches; that collarbone is held together with wire and pins – you’ll be lucky to use your arm in six months, let alone any time soon.”

Jamieson sank back to the pillow, realizing his position was hopeless.

Knudson continued, “We spoke to one of your colleagues, a fellow named Andrew–”

“Carlson Andrew, yes”, said Jamieson, impatient now.

“Well, Dr. Andrew told me some pretty interesting things about your work over at the University,” said Knudson.

“Go on.” Jamieson’s voice was flat. Either the detective knew, in which case he’d have to explain everything (to the chagrin of his backers, who wanted the technology for themselves), or he didn’t, in which case he had a pretty good idea what his next move would be — in a day; six months; ten years – it didn’t matter….

“Yes. Andrew told me you were working on a – time machine.” Detective Knudsen could barely hold his snicker-smile from his face.

Jamieson paused. “What the hell”, he thought. “Might as well see what his face does next.”

“That’s correct, Detective.”

Knudson’s smirk froze, then turned to stone. “You are kidding, right?”

“No, Detective. I’m not.” Jamieson was equally stoic.

“Christ!”, said Knudson. “You mean that Dr. Kelso—“ he flipped through his notes, “—could have used this thing and disappeared like–” He let his words freeze in midair; colder than the turn of the conversation.

“Yes”, said Jamieson, locking eyes with Detective Knudson. “He could.”

Knudson got up and quickly walked out the door. Jamieson could hear muffled conversation between he and the nurse; voices getting louder as both sides stood their ground.

Knudson walked back in with Dr. Noyes.

“We have to find a way to get you on your feet, and quickly”, said Knudson.

Jamieson chuckled.

“What could be funny now?”, said Knudson.

“You don’t understand. At all.” Jamieson allowed the smile to ease from his face, then said, “Detective, tear a piece of paper out of your notebook there.”

Knudson did so. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Sit.” Jamieson nodded to the seats at the side of his bed. Dr. Noyes sat beside Detective Knudson.

“What you’re holding is a graphic representation of the universal-timeline, Detective. What my ‘machine’ does is very simple – it creates two points, both in space and time. One is here-and-now; the other is then-and-there.”

He waited for Knudson and Noyes to grasp this, then continued. “Now, take your pen. Make a mark at any point on the paper. Then, make another mark at any other point.”

Knudson did so; then looked intently at Jamieson.

“Now, hold the paper together until the two points meet.”

Knudson did so, his eyes widening. “We ‘jump’ at that point, Detective. And, before you ask the question – yes – it really is that simple.”

“That explains the use of electricity by your facility,” said Knudson.

“I can see you’ve done some of your homework well, Detective. Now, I’m going to give you some very clear instructions. I want you to write these down; read them back to me, then go find Dr. Andrew to help you.” He spent the next half-hour instructing Detective Knudson in the operation of the machine.

“Now, I’m going to tell you something else. Listen carefully, because I will only say this once.” He paused to allow the words to sink in.

“There are some people who have funded this operation who would be very, very disappointed in what I’ve just done and said. For that reason, the information I’ve just given you must never leave this room in your case, Doctor, and must never go any farther than Andrew, in your case, Detective. If you do, both of you will be dead in a week, and likely your families as well. Do you understand?”

Detective Knudson froze, then nodded, slowly.

“Good. Now, go find Andrew, and come back when you have finished.”

Knudson didn’t like being told what to do by a civilian. He started to object; Jamieson cut him off.

“Detective – I can appreciate your situation – you’re usually in charge of such things. Let me quite assure you that this is far beyond your pay-grade and far beyond your scope of authority. Please just do as I’ve requested, and then come right back here. I’ll assure you’ll see then that I’m cooperating fully, and then some, with your investigation.”

Suddenly tired, Jamieson relaxed fully on his pillow. In a moment he was asleep.

About an hour later, he was nudged awake by the detective.

“Dr. Andrew and I obtained what you wanted. It’s here.” Knudson placed a piece of paper in front of Jamieson’s face to read.

“Pull that back about four inches, will you?”, said Jamieson. Focusing, he read the numbers on the page, along with some other data. He smiled.

“What is this, Doctor Jamieson?”

“It’s the proof I needed, Detective.”

“Suppose you tell me what I need to know, Doctor?”

“Detective, that information is proof that the machine was used, as I had intended to use it, although to a different location and different point in time. It’s proof that Dr. Kelso was the one who used it, and it’s proof that you will never find Dr. Kelso unless you are fully willing to wait for me to heal.”

“We don’t have that kind of time, Doctor. He could be anywhere.”

Jamieson laughed. His face told Jamieson that Knudson couldn’t see what was funny at all.

“Detective, remember my little paper-analogy about time travel?”

“Yeah, and?”

“Dear Dr. Kelso forgot one thing. That’s what this information also proves.  He forgot to erase his coordinates. That means he intends to come back. That also means he’s left the relative equivalent of a paper-trail – because it works both ways; what he can find, we can use.”

Jamieson continued, as if in a classroom. “You see, it’s all relative. He could be gone half a lifetime – but the absolutes are still in the machine. We can go find him, right where he materialized, a moment after he does so. We can even show up five minutes beforehand and have the handcuffs ready, or whatever you folks do nowadays.”

He finished, half-laughing, “No, Detective – we don’t have to rush. If this shoulder takes six months to heal properly, we have six months.”

“We have all the time in the world.”

____________________________

“I’m confused, Doctor Jamieson.” Detective Knudson was standing at Jamieson’s bedside a week later, still with his notepad; still puzzled.

Jamieson awoke from a half-sleep. His shoulderblade was knitting up well, but he’d never go through a metal-detector again without sounding all kinds of alarms – and since the PDA (patient-delivered anaesthetic) hadn’t yet taken full effect that morning, he had this dull ache in his shoulder and back.

“Look”, he began. “I have a hole in my back, and my shoulderblade looks like a cowpattie after a heatwave. I’ve got a golf-ball sized hole in my chest. They both hurt like hell. So sit down and tell me what’s on your mind, or shut up and get out – but do one or the other, before the morphine kicks in.”

Knudson didn’t argue. He saw the pain in the other man’s eyes.

“Doctor, my confusion stems from the fact that Doctor Kelso could also, it seems, come back any time he chose – am I right?”

“Yes – and no. Remember those coordinates in the machine?”

“Well, yes.” Knudson waited, patiently.

“They’re the only ‘absolute’ in the equation, so to speak. We know exactly when he’s coming back.”

“And that’s my other question, Doctor – I waited until now to ask you, because I thought your mind would be clearer. Why would he choose a date fifty years in the future?”

“Because he was taking the same gamble that I would have, Detective. The gamble that the machine would still be here – and that the heat would have died down. You see, he meant for me to die – not wind up here.”

“But there’s no statute of limitations on murder, Doctor Jamieson.”

“Yes – but how many cases have you seen in the news – someone escapes from prison fifty years earlier for a heinous murder – and they’re found living in a suburban neighborhood after having gone straight; married, raised a family–”

Knudson cut him off. “But they didn’t use time machines to do it!” He realized how surreal that comment sounded – but there were many things which he was struggling to absorb about this case.

“No, they didn’t. But still – how many of those cases have resulted in a commutation-of-sentence?”
“Most”, admitted Knudson, albeit reluctantly.

“Q.E.D.”, said Jamieson, his voice a bit slurred. Morphine –

“So, you’re saying that we have to wait fifty years to catch this guy?”

“No, Detective. You don’t.”

“Why is that, Doctor?”

“Because you and I are going back – to catch – that sumbitch–”

Jamieson drifted to sleep. Knudson’s eyes were wide.

“I see”, he thought. “I see.”

Christopher Handley, an electrical engineer and computer  programmer who cares for his ill mother, attends bible study and Manga collector was sentenced on February 11, 2010, four years after the prosecution began in Iowa for possession of Lolicon Manga books and magazines, which had been seized by the United States Post Office.

Included in the court documents is the list of the seven books that Handley had shipped to him and that U.S. Post Office officials seized in May 2006. The seizure led to a warrant to search Handley’s home and eventually being charged for possession of obscene materials. The seven books are:

• Mikansei Seifuku Shōjo (Unfinished School Girl) by Yuki Tamachi (LE Comics)
• I [Heart] Doll by Makafusigi (Seraphim Comics)
• Kemono for ESSENTIAL 3 (THE ANIMAL SEX ANTHOLOGY Vol.3) by Masato Tsukimori et al (Izumi Comics)
• Otonari Kazoku (Neighboring House Family) by Nekogen (MD Comics)
• Eromon by Makafusigi (Seraphim Comics)
• Kono Man_ ga Sugoi! (This Man_ is Awesome!) by Makafusigi (Seraphim Comics)
• Hina Meikyū (Doll Labyrinth) by Makafusigi (Seraphim Comics)

Each of these volumes of Manga, according to court documents, contained minors engaged in sexual acts, sexual abuse involving minors from adults, or minors engaged in bestiality. In addition, when law officials searched Handley’s home, they seized more than 1,200 items, including Manga and other documents. However, most were returned to Handley after they were determined to not “constitute or contain contraband.” More than 80 books were retained. Court documents revealed that many of the books retained were from the anthology Comic LO (LO meaning “Lolita Only”). Handley admitted to buying the aforementioned seven books from a place called “cosplay café,” and told officials he had ordered “similar materials earlier from ‘Jlist’ in Japan and ‘Mand[a]rake.com.’”

Handley’s case was prosecuted not under child pornography laws, but rather obscenity laws.  These laws seem to be a tool of the last administration and are incredibly hard to figure out.  Handley’s lawyer, Eric Chase made the comment in a Wired Magazine interview, “Obscenity is the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them.”

Christopher Handley is an avid collector of Manga, an animated form of literature.  His collection is huge and only a very small part of it was Lolicon (the term for sexualized youth Manga) He was not a collector of Lolicon but Manga. Of the thousands of books and magazines found by the Feds at Chris’ home, only about twenty had questionable content and ultimately only seven were charged as clearly depicting the violent sexual abuse of obviously very young children fell under the obscenity laws.

According to his lawyer, Eric Chase, Esq., “In understanding Chris’ situation, you have to understand the Ashcroft opinion, which has been universally and tragically, at least for Chris, misunderstood.   That case held that sexual images of virtual minors could not be prosecuted as child pornography. However, it did not hold that virtual child pornography was legal. Rather, it expressly stated that those depictions could be prosecuted as obscenity under the Miller standard.  In short hand, Miller’s three prongs require for conviction a finding that a depiction is 1) sexual in nature (prurient); 2) patently offensive; and 3) lacking in serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.  The first two prongs are judged by community standards and the third by an objective standard.”

The laws are further confused by statements made in the Ashcroft vs. Free Speech case which played a defining role in Handley’s case.  For example:  “While we have not had occasion to consider the question, we may assume that the apparent age of persons engaged in sexual conduct is relevant to whether a depiction offends community standards. Pictures of young children engaged in certain acts might be obscene where similar depictions of adults, or perhaps even older adolescents, would not.”

It is this last statement that really poses a problem.  What might be considered offensive to community standards in one area like the Bible belt may not be considered offensive in another area like California.

It seems clear that Handley had no idea that these issues were illegal and no intention to do harm. He states “I didn’t realize that this material fell under the banned paraphernalia within the US.” Handley said if he had known the material was against the law he would “never have ordered it and would have destroyed any of it that I currently am in possession of.”  Handley had no criminal record and was not ordered to register as a sex offender.

What Handley and probably a lot of other collectors are unaware of was that Congress passed 18 USC 1466A, which criminalized as obscenity a laundry list of virtual depictions, including comics, that portray the sexualization of minors, or what looks like minors.    What makes 1466A different is that it carries a mandated 5 year sentence for receipt of items that are considered obscene.

Eric Chase also pointed out “the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) and others concerned about the defense of comic books specifically, and free speech generally, are upset that the case did not go to trial.  They are right to be.  The Miller obscenity test is vague, indecipherable, and clearly curtails  protected speech.  Among its most frightening aspects is that its “community standards” element may allow “moral majority” communities to dictate to the rest of us.”

Lest you think Christopher Handley is an isolated incidence, Louis Sirkin and Max Hardcore are currently waging an important battle in their appeal of the conviction on the issue of what the appropriate community is for the Miller test.  The argument, with which some courts have already agreed, is that in an interconnected internet world, you can’t allow the most repressive of “communities” to dictate what is available to everyone else.

Also  in this  last week, in U.S. v. Whorley, a federal appeals court upheld a 20-year prison term for a man convicted of receiving “Japanese anime-style cartoons of children engaged in explicit sexual conduct with adults.”  Cases like this are not limited to the United States. An Australian court upheld a man’s conviction for possessing sexually explicit Simpson’s cartoons.

While I am not advocating images of minors having sex, twenty years seems like an unreasonable amount of time for someone to be in prison solely for owning literary material.  In addition novels, biographies and film depicting the same sorts of acts do not seem to merit the same punishment.  Think of Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby.  If we were going to be fair across the board, then clearly a movie with a thirteen year old child prostituting herself would merit at least an investigation into the capacity of that parent to keep their child safe and well balanced.  Consider also the video game franchises that provide not so secret codes that allow players to view sex acts.

Also at issue here is the idea that simply having literature that depicts child sexual acts translates to child sexual abuse.  In this case I feel nothing could be further from the truth as the depictions are illustrated and do not use actual minors.  Also to reiterate, the Manga in question was a part of a collection and nowhere near the main part.  In fact only seven of the books qualified under obscenity laws.

There is a bigger picture here and that is censorship.  On a worldwide scale who decides what to censor and when?  Referring back to the Miller Obscenity test, it would seem that the world would be the community to decide what is censored and what is not.  The Lolicon genre is not one that is terribly regular in the United States.  A case could be made for the community of review to be much larger, in which case the outcome of the prosecution would be much different.

Christopher Handley decided to go with a guilty plea.  By doing this he avoided a sentence similar to his contemporaries.  Six months in a halfway house with fines is more appropriate than twenty years in prison. However an important outcome came from this case.  The second prong of the Miller test was challenged and found unconstitutional as a judge and/or jury cannot decide what is of artistic importance or value. In effect it was found this restricted protected speech.

This also goes beyond illustrated works of literature.  Other writers are weighing in on the subject like Neil Gaiman, who rallied his fan base by posting his opinion on the subject, attracting a great deal of attention to the issue of free speech as well as supporting the CBLDF’s decision; citing the First Amendment and the problematic nature of the law as “big blunt instrument,” Gaiman argued the defending the freedom to express what you find reprehensible is a necessary part of defending speech that you like. Other comic writers like Valerie d’Orazio, raised serious questions about whether they could support the CBLDF when it is “fighting for the right of a publisher to print images of little children having sex.”

Whether or not one believes that Manga depicting youth in sexual acts is right or wrong, one must consider that just as guns don’t kill people, people kill people; Manga does not cause one to have sex with minors, an individual does.

For centuries human beings have collected the weird, strange, fringe art.  Due to this today we have the opportunity to look into the minds and interests of people who have gone before us.  To not allow artistic expression may mean that future generations lose this insight into where our minds are right now.  This could have grave effects as we would be misunderstood in all our depravity but also future generations would miss lessons learned.

We cannot afford to lose sight of the larger legal reality–the consensus interpretation of the First Amendment is that prohibiting obscene expression, whether it be fiction or non, text or image, is constitutional. For that to be changed it  is going to require either a substantially new set of Supreme Court justices or amendments to existing statutes.

It is this fight that we should be concerned with.

http://uncivilsociety.org/handley_order.pdf

http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/dailyopinions/opinion.pdf/064288.P.pdf

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZO.html

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1466A.html

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/13488.html

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html

http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2008/12/simpsons-porn-case-follow-up.html

*Author’s Note: Neither myself nor Subversify condones child pornography or the exploitation of minors.  This report is for informational purposes and reflection on Artistic Freedoms.

While most of us were interested in either the game or the halftime performance of what’s left of The Who, the presence of a Focus On The Family-sponsored Super-Bowl advertisement against abortion featuring Heisman Trophy-winner Tim Tebow didn’t escape my attention.

As with much from the Religious Right, the ad was full of half-truths and a whole lot of dogma. What matters isn’t what was said – but what they didn’t say.

The moral statement of the Tebow ad was “Tim Tebow exists because his mother had the courage not to take a physician’s recommendation, and instead relied on prayer and the ‘power of God’, and said ‘yes’ to life and ‘no’ to abortion.” (They don’t address a nagging bit of fact – that abortion is illegal in the Philippines; as such, it’s doutful a local physician would have recommended the procedure).

Pam Tebow and her husband Bob were missionaries in the Philippines (where they run a religious compound and orphanage in a largely Muslim part of the country) when she contracted amoebic dysentery and was prescribed some serious medication. In the process, her fetus was damaged; the doctors diagnosed something called ‘placental abruption’ – where the placenta is actually detached. When this happens, the fetus dies. They recommended abortion as the best course – because continuing the pregnancy would, in most similar cases, have ended with Pam’s death as well.

Now, placental abruption is a rarity – in fact, it happens in only 1% of all pregnancies, and almost always results in stillbirth. If left untreated by abortion, it almost always results in the death of the mother.

In the Tebow’s case, the diagnosing physician was wrong.

Of course, the Tebow’s gave all the credit to ‘god’, stating that prayer ‘healed’ the condition.

The truth of the matter is that the Tebow’s situation was blind dumb luck – and nothing more than that. Placental abruption is rare – and misdiagnosis of same is even more rare, placing Pam Tebow in a position, some 23 years later, to make an advertisement sponsored by one of the wealthiest religious organizations on the planet, telling everyone that if they ignore their physicians and call on ‘god’, everything will work out fine.

There are no statistics on the number of women who’ve done just that in similar circumstances – but the death statistics regarding women who’ve endured placental abruption with no medical care indicate that most of them don’t have the ‘miracle’ which Pam Tebow experienced.  The sad and unvarnished truth is that there are no ‘miracles’ in these cases – the mothers (along with the fetuses) simply wind up dead.

Spending nearly $3 million dollars to tell the world that ignoring a physician’s diagnosis is a ‘miracle’ is charlatanism on a grand scale, and the entire Tebow family (Bob included) are accomplices grande.

Bob Tebow’s wife and son view life the same way. It’s not surprising they did the ad. After all – every preacher needs an audience, and a look at Bob Tebow’s website will convince you that he’s a Fundie on a serious mission.

The ad?

It was an end – and a means – and a cautionary tale, at least for those of us who paid attention.

In the last light of the evening, the woman goes down to the lake shore. Every evening, she takes this route down to the shore and looks out over the darkling water.

She is elderly now, her frame squat and heavy, her small eyes heavy-lidded and her speech and movements slow. She worries in autumn about the pains in her joints the cold will bring, and in the summer she worries about the food she must lay in for the winter. And most of all she worries about being alone. That is her one great fear – loneliness.

“Each day,” she murmurs, “there are fewer of us.” Once the lake was full of life, but that is too long ago to think about. “Soon,” she says, “I will be the only one.”

She sees a man come along the path, dragging a large branch along for firewood. She knows him vaguely, and nods. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, contemptuously. The tips of the twigs of the branch he’s dragging scrape across her toes.

“Tomorrow,” she thinks, staring at his back, “he, too, will be gone.” She can’t say how she knows this, but she knows it. Tomorrow this man will have gone as well, and the lake will be emptier than ever, and in her heart she can’t find it to blame him for his rudeness.

“I really must go across the lake,” the woman thinks, looking at the far shore and trying not to remember her younger days. “I must go, and meet for one last time those on that side who will be going soon, and whom I shall never meet again.” She thinks of the young couple she had seen, the couple who had been laughing and kissing on the grassy bank of the lake, just a month or two ago now. Maybe that couple has gone already. If not, they will go, and not together, either. They have all gone separately, after all, including her children. Nobody is left.

It is dark now, and the first stars come out, pricking the black sky with points of light. The stars shine on the lake too, as the lights of houses used to shine once. The stars in the lake shift and ripple as the water rises and falls.

“One day perhaps,” thinks the old woman suddenly, “I shall go too.” This has not occurred to her before. It is a strange and frightening thought, and she wants to push it away to the back of her mind, and at the same time catch hold of it and examine it and dissect its implications. “Perhaps tomorrow I shall go, and the man there with the branch will be here, and then he will go as well.”

She turns away from the lake, which is suddenly an alien place, frightening and heaving in the starlight, like an unquiet sleeper. She stops just for one moment, for one last look over her shoulder at the water.

Something splashes far out towards the middle of the lake, and there comes a noise, a gasp and a splash. The woman turns quickly, trying to see, but whatever it is, it’s gone. The stars rise and fall on distant expanding ripples on the water.

“Something…” and there comes an echo from the hidden caverns of her memory. “Something there,” she says, looking.

And then it comes again, closer, nearer to her now, the starlight catching the breaking water and the smooth bulge of forehead and the long toothed beak. The animal gasps in the night air, and is gone again, only a puff of dissipating vapour to mark its passing.

The woman scrambles down to the water and kneels by its edge, heedless of the ooze of mud on her knees. “Baiji?,” she asks. “Baiji, is that you?”

The evening breeze ruffles the water, and the night is getting darker, and still the woman kneels in the mud, desperate, waiting. “Baiji,” she says. “River princess, is that you? Have you come back, after all these decades? Are you then home again?”

As if in answer, the dolphin rises again, so close that she might almost have reached out and touched it. It lingers a moment on the water surface, its long beak and small head moving, and then it breathes and its smooth humped back slides under the water and it is gone.

“Baiji,” murmurs the woman. She climbs stiffly to her feet. “River princess,” she says. “I don’t know where you have been all these years, but you have chosen to return. If going away is the price I have to pay for your return, then I will pay it gladly, River princess. When the old seasons turn new, if you are here, that is all I need to be here again – wherever I may go.”

The wind ruffles the leaves of the trees, and the banks of the lake lie deserted, and the stars wheel by overhead on their inscrutable courses.

Out on the water, the dolphin broaches again.

(Note: the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, has been functionally extinct since 2006, which means that if it still exists, there are too few individuals left to form a reproducing population.)

My wife is taking karate classes.  I really thought she was perfectly fit after a three year gymnasium program that included aerobics, weight lifting, basketball, swimming, saunas and a tidy little membership fee of seventy-five dollars a month.  According to her, I’ve saved money, as otherwise the funds could be going to doctor bills.  In the entire time we were married, I remember her going to the doctors twice; both times to have babies.  Since her physical fitness program, she has gone three times more; once for a sprained ankle, which she twisted  determinedly in making that last basket, winning the game for her team, the Hillside Grizzly’s.  The second time she wrenched her shoulder when she threw a twenty pound bar bell at a man who suggested women should spend more time in the kitchen.   Fortunately, her accuracy with barbells is not quite as good as her ability to throw basketballs or I would have been paying two doctor bills.  The third time, I’m ashamed to say, happened when her voracious team had just won the Combined Hazelwood and Monroe District Demolition Derby, which is an organized effort to drag women everywhere out of their houses and turn them into Zena sized aggravated assault weapons.  They got into a towel slapping contest while they were all taking a sauna together and she slipped on the floor, bruising her hip and once again injuring her ankle.

My wife was born practically indestructible.  Her three hundred pound mother could yank a sailor right up out of his  boat by the roots of his hair and slap out every fishing lie he ever told.  Marrying into her family was at once the bravest and most tactical maneuver a one hundred thirty-five pound, first year teacher could do.  Although it meant sacrificing all illusions that Alpha reigned supreme, within my own paltry existence, at least, I had Home Front Security as back-up.

You might wonder why a woman who already had a fortress behind her and the swing of a kick box champion would need to add karate to her fields of expertise.  I blame a blog site I innocently stumbled on called, “Sir John Bull”.  I wouldn’t have lingered there, but as he talked about that terrible conspiracy of women known as feminazi’s, I realized he was talking about my wife.  I trembled.  Delicious tingles went up and down my spine.  Here was a man who dared to say we should catapult ourselves a thousand years into the past and designate all women with biceps over two inches to the Roman Coliseum.  Here were naughty thoughts beyond anything I had even dared to dream for fear the answering call of Motherhood would strike me dead.  While I was still boggling over the site that assured me only evil could befall the households that didn’t have their women as properly trained as guard dogs, and wondering how I would ever be able to wrestle my wife into surrendering control of what had been assumed a joint checking account,  she walked in on me and saw what I was reading.

I would have been better off viewing images of Amsterdam’s red light district.  “Do you know what I’d do if a man like that ever laid a finger on me?”  She asked.  I knew.  She would use that round head of an author for a basketball and drop him in the garbage disposal fifty yards away.  She told me anyway, while I patiently, rapidly and numerous times explained that I had only been searching for information on cattle breeding.

The entire conversation came around to the definition of forced entry.  If a man went to a party and waited around in the bathroom until all the guests were gone and the host sleeping, would the crimes he commits  also include forceful entry?  He didn’t break down any doors, but through the same secrecy used by someone who springs a lock with a credit card, he committed the same crimes.  By the same token, is someone who is lulled into believing she is secure, then pinned down through the sheer weight and force of her opponent allowed to claim forceful entry even though there are no damaged body parts?  This debate relieved me of any random guilty thoughts that strayed into my mind about letting Nick Ericksen, the object of her vindictive mood, know she had an Archille’s Ankle, plus gave me an avenue for a new sales pitch.

“You know,” I said.  “There are women who enjoy liberalizing their bodies.”

“My body is liberalized,” she responded quickly.  “I have a normal sex drive and my responses are quite adequate.”

Assuming she wasn’t talking about a partner I didn’t know about, I agreed.  After all, questioning the normalcy of a woman’s sex drive can only lead to a disastrous and detailed explanation concerning your tactics and prowess, and a pep talk on how they can be improved.  “But,” I insisted, “some women aren’t as normal as you.  They enjoy spreading their charms around a little, and consequently feel they should be paid for it.”

Before she could be allowed to go into a long lecture on conditioned exploitation, I continued.  “Consider this.  If women who choose to do so, were allowed to exhibit their bodies and gratify sexually frustrated men for a fee; without legal repercussions or social stigma;  think about how much pressure would be taken off, uh… normal women.”

She considered.  “I suppose it’s a better alternative than having Neanderthals clubbing women over the heads and dragging them through the streets,” she admitted.

At last I could play my angle.  “I was solicited recently by a pornographic site that claims all donations will be given to charity.”

“Pornographic?”  Her eyebrows hit her hairline.  The Woman’s Brigade of Decent Feminine Exposure was a key tone away from her fingertips.  “Charity,” I emphasized.

Her fingertips tapped worriedly on the table.  After all, it becomes difficult to question the ones who claim their motivations are for charity.  “That’s what the press release says,” I encouraged.

“Let me see the site.”  I did, filled with dread at her reactions.  Sure enough, the site does claim its proceeds will go to charity.  She allowed me a five second investigation into the page that listed the magazines offered, then declared that was enough.  She then child proofed the site, which has only been affective against allowing me access, but not our teenaged children whose computer skills must have been breathed into them the day the first sound image was taken and the doctor announced, “yep, it’s a boy.”

I felt I had won an enormous victory for free hearted women everywhere.  I exhaled a breath of pure joy.  That’s when she told me however, that she was going to take up karate.  Already feeling the dread inadequacy of being unable to drop a basket from three hundred yards while practicing a yoga one leg stand, I finally summoned the courage to ask why.  “The Hillside Grizzly’s have a mission.  We are going to hunt down bubble brains that molest women as an excuse to steal their handbags and drag them back to the Carlsbad Caverns where they belong.”

While I guiltily refrained from mentioning that the person who ignited her passion lived in England, I just as guiltily wondered once more if I should warn the world at large that she has an Archille’s Ankle.  I decided it wasn’t worth it.  The economy is tough.  Tolerance levels are low.  If worse comes to worse, I could always convince her to become my body guard for a bootleg tobacco and alcohol operation.

Under the marginal agreement of my wife’s consent to sponsor a pornographic page for the sole purpose of its possible rescue of unfortunate people everywhere, the link is provided below.  The fair and dainty gender have also informed me that the publication of this site does not necessarily express my views, and certainly not those of the magazine: That it is only being offered in the spirit of free choice and viewer discretion is advised.  Now that I’ve covered all the legal angles, I’ll have it made if I can just bribe my son into breaking the parental code.

Hassenfield Press Release:

World’s First Charity-Porn Site Launches and Raises over $1,000 in First Month, Including over $750 for Haiti

Los Angeles, CA – February 19, 2010 – With the motto “Saving the World with Porn”, Hassenfeld Holdings LLC has launched the world’s first charity-porn website, raising over $1,000 for charity in their first month, including over $750 for the relief effort in Haiti. The company will make a significant charitable donation for every adult website subscription purchased through their site, www.karmaporn.com. Visitors can read reviews of hundreds of adult sites, and can select which charitable cause they wish to donate to, from funding cancer research to fighting poverty. In addition, donations are completely anonymous, requiring no additional forms or personal information. Subscription prices on Karma Porn are the same or cheaper than on the adult sites themselves – donations are taken exclusively from referral fees paid by the adult sites, which are independent of subscription costs.

Within their first month of launching, Hassenfeld Holdings has raised over $1,000 dollars for charity from Karma Porn, including over $750 for the relief effort in Haiti, and they expect bigger donation totals in the months ahead. They are the first website to tap into the massive Internet porn revenue stream – estimated to be $4.9 billion dollars[1] – and use this money for charitable causes. In addition, their unique business model allows them to donate a significant amount to charity with each subscription (upwards of $20, depending on the referral deal arranged with each porn site) without affecting subscription prices or requiring any additional forms. Because donations are anonymous, Karma Porn does not keep any personal information about any visitor or subscriber to their site. They only record whether a sign-up was made to an adult site, and what charity that sign-up should be associated with. Receipts of all donations are posted on Karma Porn, so subscribers can see proof that their donations are getting to the charities they’ve selected.

Karma Porn is able to donate anonymously to charities using a number of novel techniques. They allow visitors on their site to select from a list of general charitable categories, instead of listing specific charities by name. This ensures that no specific charity appears to be affiliated with a porn-related site. Second, they send all donations anonymously though established, third-party donation websites, so no charity is intentionally receiving money from porn. Third, they censor indentifying transactional information on posted receipts, to prevent the possibility of retroactive cancellations. Finally, they ensure that every charity they donate to is rated three stars or higher on CharityNavigator.com, so that each subscriber’s donation is put to the best possible use for the cause they’ve selected. Since Karma Porn has an international customer base, donations are made to large, global charities with a multinational focus as opposed to local or regional charities whenever possible.

The idea of Karma Porn was developed out of a genuine desire to give back to society combined with the intent to create a very unique charity website. Research into the adult industry’s online business model provided the impetus and realization that a charity-porn website was possible. Most adult sites do not do their own advertising – they instead rely on a vast network of affiliates to advertise for them in complex, tiered referral programs. The affiliate is given a set payment for each subscriber they bring to the adult site. Because the online adult industry is so saturated with sites and content, affiliate marketing programs allow adult sites to reach massive target audiences for low costs, thereby staying afloat in a veritable ocean of online adult advertising. Karma Porn takes advantage of this model by diverting referral fees from porn advertisers to charities. Since referral fees are already built into adult site subscription plans, Karma Porn can make significant charitable donations without affecting subscription prices at all.

“Anyone planning to sign up for an adult site simply has to stop by Karma Porn first, and a large percentage of their subscription fee will be donated to the charity of their choice, instead of the pockets of the porn industry,” says Hassenfeld Holdings spokesperson Andrew Johnson. “Karma Porn is already raising money for reputable charities around the world, and we expect to raise even more money in the future. Adult pornography is both legal and taxable. If the Government can collect money from porn, this money can also be donated to charitable organizations that wish to provide food and shelter to the underprivileged, research for deadly diseases, or any of the other charitable causes that we support on our site. Karma Porn has created a way to make this process fast, easy, and anonymous, without adding a penny in costs. With billions of dollars in annual revenue in the online adult industry, we believe we can make a huge difference with Karma Porn.”

About Hassenfeld Holdings, LLC: Hassenfeld Holdings develops, promotes, owns and operates unique and creative websites which attempt to change the way people think, and make a noticeable improvement in the world through the services or features they provide. Their website, www.karmaporn.com, donates money to charities with each porn site subscription purchased via their site. In its first month of operation, Karma Porn has already raised over $1,000 for charity.

www.karmaporn.com.