I take that title of this post (above) from that run-away success of the, erm, Freakonomics genre, Freakonomics. My buddy Brian Kim recommended the by-now dated book to me. I had been avoiding it for some time up to now; the book’s got great content, but a horrible, horrible title.

Anyway, the book veers off, for a considerably long passage, come to think of it, into the story of this cat named Kennedy who went undercover in the Ku Klux Klan back in the 1940’s and fed all of their secret codes, handshakes, ghost stories, etc. to the producers of the Superman radio show… *Cough*

Let me pause for a moment and note that I am actually listening to the book on my iPod and thus almost burst a blood vessel laughing every time the somewhat snarky narrator uttered term “Klavilers.”

Anyway, everybody knows that the Ku Klux Klan hates blacks, Jews, Gypsies, carnie-folk, and, oh yeah, Catholics.

That’s always been kind of exciting to me, to be hated by a hate group. For a white guy from the Northeast burbs, it feels good to put my persecuted-boots on once in a while. I mean, sure, these days all Muslim extremists hate Americans, but, as Jon Stewart aptly put it, “We’re kind of all on that hit list,” so it’s not really the same.

Listening to the Klan story in the book yesterday, I began thinking about my usual guttural reaction to the reminder that there’s a whole group of sheet-wearin’ rednecks down in the dirty South hatin’ on my religion. When the fact that the Klan, for reasons I’ve never actually bothered to look into, has a gripe against Catholics (Freakonomics informed me that the Klan was started by a couple of Irish guys, which could provide a clue, depending on which part of the island they were from) is brought up, my initial reaction has always been the same: “Oh yeah, assholes? Well, I’m a Catholic. What are you gonna do about it?” My chest-bumping fantasy usually then descends into images of an epic bar fight, at which point I snap out of it and remind myself to keep my eyes on the road.

Funny thing is, I’m not a practicing Catholic. Far from it. Though I was baptized a Catholic, and have some hazy memories of going to church when I was young, that’s about as far as my connection to the Church goes. At some point I started chompin’ down communion wafers when I did find myself being offered one. But I was never Confirmed. I don’t attend Mass. And, truth be told, I’m quite dubious of the whole Pope-as-voice-of-God notion.

Let’s think this situation through. The wholly rational reaction for someone with only a vague connection to a church or institution upon hearing that a dangerous/terrorist group wants people of that church or institution dead or banished would, of course, be, “Well. I’m not really much of a Catholic anyway…” i.e., denouncement. In life, if saving one’s skin be the most pressing day-to-day action, cutting ties with a group you don’t much care for anyway to decrease your likeliness of persecution, even if the possibility of that persecution is relatively remote, seems like a no-brainer. And yet I have the exact opposite reaction. Upon learning that a hate group like the Klan may be wanting to hurt the practitioners of the religion of my birth, though it’s a religion that I’m in reality only quasi-connected to, my reaction is to get angry, rebellious, confrontational, and, perhaps, a bit violent-minded. And I don’t think it’s just me.

This seems to be the natural human reaction to the feeling of being unjustly hated-on. Need proof? Just take a look at American Muslims these days. Since 9/11, scrutiny on Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis, and all other Muslim’s has soared. Though most haden’t done anything different/wrong since the attacks, Muslims were pressed to assimilate more into American culture, to prove their bona-fides, as it were. Funny thing is, American Muslims already were quite assimilated. Certainly more assimilated than the vast numbers of Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants. And certainly more assimilated than their Islamic-brethren in various Western European countries. And they set upon this path of assimilation of their own volition. They came to America, they saw that people who learned the language, tried to fit in, and cast their public alliance with the greater community prospered fastest, that’s exactly what most Muslim immigrants did. And, for their troubles, Muslim-Americans as a whole were much more successful, and much more accepted, than their European counterparts. It’s true they sacrificed some of their Islamic-identity to gain this acceptance, but it was their own choice to do so; a calculated trade-off for a more successful life in the US. Besides, it must have been heartening that everyone else in the US had to go through a similar cultural shedding in order to fit in and move ahead. After all, it’s not like they were coming into a millennium-old culture/race like, say, France, and being asked to act like the natives. In America, there are no natives. Everybody’s some kind of immigrant and, while there is certainly an American Culture, it’s one every single new immigrant, and thus every American, had to adapt to when they came over. This we’re-all-in-it together mentality must have given some comfort to Muslim women as they discarded their hijab head-scarves.

But, following 9/11, after Muslim’s have been demonized and Muslim-American persecution is at its highest, they hijab’s are being put back on in record numbers. At precisely the instance where, rationally, one would expect Muslim-Americans to keep their head’s down and redouble their efforts to fit in, they’re differentiating themselves from American Culture at large more than ever. It can be befuddling and maddening to see this kind of thing. A Muslim family walks into an airport with the women covered head-to-toe and the men sporting beards straight out of a horror movie, and they then proceed to bitch when they’re searched more thoroughly than the other passengers at the screening area. It can be annoying, yes, but I suppose the reason for this post is to point out that it’s perfectly understandable. The feeling of persecution is a powerful, anger-inducing, rebellion-breeding feeling. Especially in a country such as the United States, a country that strides to curb all forms of persecution, its existence is capable of causing button-down, rational people to furrow their brows and push back against their tormentors with equal or excessive force. And so the formerly music-obsessed Muslim teenage girl is reading her Quran and donning the head-scarf (that one’s pretty predictable; who likes to rebel more than teenagers?), and the money-obsessed Arab Wall Street Trader is growing his beard and daring the airport screeners to treat him differently than other passengers. It’s all a big “Fuck You” to a scared and hostile society at large. And it’s human nature.

Senator and presidential contender John McCain scored some major points with your humble space correspondent over the past week by finally standing up to Bush on a meaningful issue.

McCain and a couple other Republican Senators have rejected the Bush administration’s plan to “clarify” Article 3 of the Geneva Convention (which the Supreme Court has ruled the US Government must follow when interrogating terror suspects).

In a style we have come expect from the past couple of Presidents, Bush has taken an “it can mean whatever we want it to mean” attitude towards the language of International Law. Clinton quibbled over “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” and now the Bush administration tries to find some wiggle-room in a statute that prohibits nations from engaging in, “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Basically, Bush wants the CIA to be able to use some harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Given Bush’s penchant for secret prisons and disdain for fair trials (to, you know, actually prove the prisoners he wants to (what some call) torture really are terrorists), I’m not inclined to give our government that leeway. Neither is McCain, a former POW himself, and so, for the first time in recent memory, he has stood up to the President on an issue that will probably lose him considerable support among the GOP base. McCain has blocked the President’s bill.

It’s about time. I’ve lost a lot of respect for old man McCain over the past few years. He’s been doing little more than toeing the Republican line on a host of issues I find repellant, NSA wiretapping being one of them. Many have made the argument that the U.S. endorsing the harsh treatment of prisoners will virtually ensure that our troops will be likewise handled harshly when they are captured. Well, I say that’s bull. We’re fighting terrorists here, not an organized state; our troops will be treated harshly no matter what we do. But that misses the important point: we’re the Unite States of America. We’re a bastion of liberty. We’re the good guys. Well, at least that’s what Bush has been shouting from the rooftops for the last few years, offering it as justification for our country crumbling foreign dictatorships and instilling democracy where we see fit. Well, we need to keep on being the good guys. I know terrorists want to kill us. I know we could probably stop a few terrorist attacks by torturing information out of captured terrorists. But that’s not something the United States should engage in. We need to be above torture, morally, as a country. Always.

Last night on his show, Bill O’Reilly said something along the lines of, “What good is having the moral high ground if you’re dead?” You are a coward, Bill O’Reilly. You put saving your own pathetic skin above your eternal, moral soul. You make a mockery of the ideas our country was founded upon. Instead of “give me liberty of give me death,” your mantra is: save my life no matter what. No matter who has to be tortured, no matter how it affects my general human dignity. I don’t care what has to be done to them, keep me alive! You’re a pathetic coward. And so is everyone who wishes to advance the cause of state-sponsored torture.

Nice work, McCain. Way to stick up for our country’s soul.

Pope Benedict XVI stirred up some cartoon-of-the-prophet-Muhammad-esq controversy last week when, during a speech, he quoted an ancient Byzantine emperor who classified the teachings of Islam as “inhuman” and “evil” and claimed that the religion had been originally “spread by the sword.”

Muslim’s are up in arms about this, once again taking to the streets all over the world and demanding the Pope’s apology (don’t these people have jobs? Oh, right, no, they don’t). The pope engaged in some double-speak, saying he was sad that his remarks caused Muslim outrage, but not apologizing for his comments explicitly.

In a classically moronic response, Islamic terrorist groups have latched onto the widespread Muslim outrage over the pope calling their religion violent and threatened to respond with, what else, violence:

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as “the worshipper of the cross” saying “you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. … We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”

For the love of God, somebody get these guys a publicist.

A few Muslim leaders, those who bothered to think through their proclamations, replied to the pope with the valid ascertain that Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) was certainly no stranger to violently imposing its beliefs upon non-believers.

All in all, a laughable bit a business on all fronts.

It can be very easy to get caught up in the seeming hopelessness of the US’s struggle against radical Islam. We are up against a seemingly illogical enemy, one who places very little value on human life (their own lives included), and who don’t seem all that interested in their waking lives here in this world beneath Heaven. I often wonder why Osama and the rest even want to bother “converting all Americans to Islam” since they hold life on earth is such low regard; after all, young Muslim’s seem to be falling over each other for the chance to blow themselves up and escape this cursed planet.

The reasoned speeches of world leaders (or even the cowboy-threats of our President) all seem in vain when dealing with such suicidal radicals. After all, it was Machivelli who, after writing page after page on how the Prince can avoid and prevent conspiracies, warned that little could be done to stop a lone madman intent on assassination.

But I felt somehow emboldened after reading an article written on the 5^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by a prominent Muslim-American titled, “Kill Us, Too: We Are Also Americans.”

The author of the article, Aslam Abdullah, rails against the Islamic terrorists who, “hide in your caves and behind the faces of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. You don’t show your faces and you have no guts to face Muslims. You thrive on the misery of thousands of Muslim youth and children who are victims of despotism, poverty and ignorance.” The author’s language is tough, and it struck a chord with me in a way speeches by Western politicians no longer do. The Muslim author takes the terrorists to task, reminds us that this really isn’t a Western war against all of Islam, and that, if we hope to win, it would be in our best interest to keep it from becoming one:

You said you “invite you not to drop your weapons, and don’t let your souls or your enemies rest until each one of you kills at least one American within a period that does not exceed 15 days with a sniper’s gunshot or incendiary devices or Molotov cocktail or a suicide car bomb — whatever the battle may require.” I invite you to surrender, to seek forgiveness from God almighty for the senseless killing you and your supporters are involved in and repent for everything you have done.

You say that the word of God is the highest. Yes, it is. But you are not worthy of it. You have abandoned God and you have started worshipping your own satanic egos that rejoice at the killing of innocent people. You don’t represent Muslims or, for that matter, any decent human being who believes in the sanctity of life. Many among us American Muslims have differences with our administration on domestic and foreign issues, just like many other Americans do. But the plurality of opinions does not mean that we deprive ourselves of the civility that God demands from us. America is our home and will always be our home. Its interests are ours, and its people are ours. When you talk of killing of Americans, you first have to kill 6 million or so Muslims who will stand for every American’s right to live and enjoy the life as commanded by God.

The author reminds us that, despite what the radicals claim, Islam’s Allah does see extreme worth in our earthly lives and the terrorist are shaming that Godly worth with their deadly attacks.

This article serves as a reminder that, if we want to make it through this current struggle, we must convince the Muslims of the world that the terrorist do not represent them or their God, and they are amiss to hide or defend them.

Back in July of 2003, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and his boy rescued a couple of guys from drowning in a lake. The guys’ boat had sunk, and the Romney’s, who were fishing in the same lake, steered their boat over and pulled the guys out of the water. Obviously, this was too juicy a story for any Herald writer to pass up, and so the predictable media hub-bub ensued, with many people calling the Governor and his son “heroes.”

In an opinion article some republicans decried as partisan sour grapes, the Boston Globe’s Scott Leigh wrote that he did not think the Romney’s actions amounted to “heroism” (the original article is now behind the Globe Website’s pay wall, but you can see the article quoted extensively here).

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Properly speaking, however, Mitt is not a hero at all but rather a Good Samaritan. Granted, in the loose and liberal definition of modern laurels, the notion of heroism has largely lost its meaning. Thus it is that a precocious tot who dials 911 to secure help for a stricken family member now qualifies as a hero, as does the plucky pooch whose insistent barking alerts a sleeping family to a fire smoldering in the basement.

True heroism, however, comes only at the very real risk of physical harm to the rescuer. Which is why the stories of actual heroes impress themselves indelibly on our imagination.

Let me first say that it is in very bad taste for a liberal columnist to write an article devoted to bitching about the coverage being given to a Governor who actually saved lives. Let me next state that I agree with Leigh.

Scott Leigh puts into succinct wording exactly what I’ve always believed: to be a true hero, one must put his own well-being in peril in order to help others. Red Cross workers going into African war zones to treat the sick? Heroes. Firefighters running into burning buildings? Heroes. The Romney’s paddling over and pulling a couple of guys out of the water? Not so much.

All that said, there is a big group of people that I consider real heroes, and that is everyone who rushed to the Ground Zero site in the wake of 9/11. These people were New Yorkers who, in some sense of the word, had already survived 9/11. While most of us were staring anxiously at the skies above, wondering if and when the attacks would abate, these people rushed forth towards the wobbling buildings and dust filled air of attack site.

Some stayed in the unsafe environment for weeks (some for months), wheezing and coughing up black soot from their lungs all the while. The people who worked in the World Trade Centers did not choose to be part of the attacks of 9/11. They were ruthlessly murdered; they were victims. It was amazing to witness those who rushed to the scene in the aftermath, people who were spared on that Tuesday morning, choose to become part of the events of 9/11, choose, as it turns out, to hurt themselves in the process.

Those heroes are sick now. A few have even died, their lungs simply giving out all these years after they inhaled the toxic dust brew of pulverized asbestos, concrete, glass, lead… that they breathed in that morning and in the days that followed. Many of the worker’s have seen their lung capacity decrease by 40% since before they worked at the pile. Imagine that: you take a breath and only receive 60% of the air you’re used to. 60% of the air you need. They still cough of black sludge. Autopsies of those who die reveal their lung tissue had turned black.

As of right now there is many of the Ground Zero workers aren’t getting any help to pay for thier medical costs. Obviously, that situation needs to be rectified.

A few days ago I read a post on the social news website Digg.com that linked to an online store selling ultra-powerful laser pointers. These laser pointers were so potent, in fact, I’d probably classify them as weapons. They could be seen from miles away, light frickin’ cigarettes, and, of course, blind you quicker than a board-with-a-nail-in-it.

A few hours ago, and, well, pretty much any few hours you care to pick before that, stretching back 3-some-odd years, I saw a news story about more violent deaths in Iraq.

For whatever reason, these two news items ended up intertwined in my psyche. I started thinking about the difficulty world powers have waging wars in current times, what with the new unacceptability of civilian casualties. In these enlightened days we live in, the United States’ vast arsenal of nuclear arms is near-useless, almost certainly regulated to “strike back” territory; the US could never climb its way out of the ditch of worldwide scorn if it were to drop an atomic bomb on a foreign city without first being nuked itself.

So, with our big guns out of the picture, the United States finds itself in the mystifying position of being back on a par with ragtag group of rebels. The insurgents in Iraq know there is no chance of the US using nuclear weapons on the country they have just liberated, and thus their arms stack up reasonably well against those of your average US soldier. Sure, the insurgent’s 80’s-era AK-47’s aren’t as quite as nice as the Marines’ shiny new rifles, but they’re pretty damn close. And insurgents may not have the ability to drop precision, laser-guided missiles onto American HumVees, but their I.E.D.’s have much the same effect.

My point is, with the terrifying technology the United States has used to prop itself up as a superpower for the past half-century out of play, the insurgents don’t fear the military mite of the US in a way we feel they probably ought to.

My solution? Laser beams.

OK, OK, this being the first Cosmonaut News blog entry and all, I’ve probably, with that last paragraph, dashed any chance of this site ever becoming a respectable opinion rag. But hear me out…

What the hell ever happened to laser beams? It wasn’t that long ago that Regan was telling us we’d be using them to shoot Russian warheads out of the sky. It isn’t so far off into the future that we, by sci-fi writer’s accounts, should all be sporting laser pistols. So why is it that that only people who seem to be keeping the death-ray-dream alive are a bunch of freaks with a little store on the InterWeb?

I’m hereby advocating the user of laser weapons by the United States military, either immediately, or as quickly as they can invent them. I want billions poured into this technology. I want every grunt G.I. armed with a head-exploding laser rifle.

Now, you see, I don’t actually think that laser guns are all that much an improvement over bullets and gunpowder. Hell, I don’t know anything about the technology; for all I know there are a million-and-one well-proven reasons they’re inferior to current weaponry. But I say use them anyway, because they’re new. And they’re terrifying.

A well-trained American Indian could shoot off a plethora of arrows in the time it took an American settler to reload his musket, but the settler was wielding a controlled explosion in the palms of his hands. Scary stuff.

A group of insurgents hits a US armored vehicle and come in firing off their AK’s in one of their typical run-and-gun attacks. All of a sudden, the US soldiers start blasting their attackers into bits with their new death-ray laser-beams! You bet your ass that even the suicide bomber’s eyes will go wide with terror and wonderment, and suddenly they’ll remember: “Oh, right, we’re at battle with the United States of American. The country with the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the history of the world …”

The US Military needs to become scary again. And, like I stated before, I’m sure there are several reasons that laser weapons are actually inferior to bullets. But this would be a psychological attack; very likely, a temporary setback in the fight against the insurgents. But it could create the type of foothold that is necessary to turn the tide.