Illegal Immigration

.
by Richard Crews
.
When I lived alone on a rural mountain top in central California in 2003, I hired a young man one day at the curb outside a Home Depot to help me move some lumber. We worked together for the better part of a morning, and talked of many things. He was a good worker and a congenial companion. He was also an illegal immigrant from Mexico; he'd been in this country for four years and had a wife and two very young children, at least one of whom had been born in this country and was therefore a U.S. citizen. He drove an unregistered and uninsured old pick-up truck. He told me he had been stopped by the California Highway Patrol six times--several of those for speeding--but had never gotten a ticket because each time the cop knew if he ticketed the young man, his immigration status would lead to his being deported.

There are estimated to be about 13 million illegal immigrants in this country. Relatively few--for example from Cuba--are here for asylum because of political oppression or--for example from African and Asian "hot spots"--to escape ethnic violence. Most have come--for example from Mexico--to escape poverty, hunger, disease, and criminal violence. They are here against all odds, against all their cultural traditions, to try to find a better life for themselves and their families.

They raise difficult questions for anyone who believes in human rights--who believes that the U.S., historically a nation of immigrants, can and should be an international beacon of freedom and opportunity.

Some say they do not compete fairly for U.S. jobs. But arguments that they are a drag on the U.S. economy are misinformed. A recent study out of UCLA, for example, of the three million illegal immigrants granted amnesty during the Reagan years found a resulting overall support of minimum wage, union strength, and national productivity.

Arguments that they can be kept out by a bigger fence or wall--a so-called "non-porous" national border--are ultimately unrealistic. Every country has a right to secure its borders, but even the Berlin Wall saw an average of 23 people killed each month trying to escape from Communist East Berlin, and hundreds did escape.

The ultimate solution, of course, would be to raise the standard of living--of health care, education, public safety, political freedom, and economic opportunity--in the would-be immigrants' home countries. Many such efforts, including NAFTA, have been tried--many are under way. But they are Sisyphean tasks, heaving against the relentless gravity of history.

In the U.S. we are engaged in an intense national dialog about illegal immigration, often more the subject of political heat than of humane or informed light. For example, the "Daily Beast" (an informational electronic newsletter) reported this morning--

"AZ Needs U.S. Help for Immigration Law

"Arizona’s tough new immigration law goes into effect Thursday, but will the state have the muscle to enforce it? Maybe not, says The Wall Street Journal: While state and local officials can arrest and imprison illegal immigrants, only federal officials have the power to deport them. State and local police are required to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check the immigration status of detainees; ICE will then let them know if the suspect is deportable. ICE has insisted that it will continue to focus on recent crossings, felony re-entries, and serious criminals. However, in the past, the federal government hasn’t withheld its cooperation."

The effects vary county by county.

"The United States has deported 115,841 illegal immigrants under the federal-local partnership since 2007, and—this is really shocking—nearly a quarter of those, 26,146, have come from a single Arizona county: Maricopa County, home to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio."
.

Rafal Blechacz Plays Chopin

.
by Richard Crews
.
I happened to hear a remarkable pianist play Chopin last night. He is technically perfect--but then so are hundreds of young pianists. What stopped me in my tracks and brought tears to my eyes is his remarkable, profound, subtle, emotional expression. It is truly Chopin as Chopin should be played: all the joy, all the despair of a tortured but triumphant life are there.
.
Chopin, in my estimation, is one of the greatest composers of all time, ranking with Bach and Mozart--significantly above Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, et al. There seems to be a bit of a conspiracy to overlook him in academic music circles mainly because his work is 95% piano and because he doesn't fit neatly into the evolution of Western classical harmony and tonality, but also because his music is very difficult to play and almost impossible to play "fully." He was barely mentioned in my undergraduate music (theory and composition) courses.
.
When I finally discovered Chopin a couple of decades ago, I got CDs of a dozen pianists renowned for their performances of Chopin--Horowitz, Rubenstein, Ashkenazy, and others. I only found two that were not disappointing--that fulfilled the essence of the music: Peter Katin and Zolton Kocsis.
.
Last night I discovered another--perhaps the king of the lot--Rafal Blechacz. When I looked him up on WikiPedia this evening, I found the following.
.
.
Rafał Blechacz born June 30 1985 Nakło n. Notecią, Poland) is a Polish classical pianist.
.
On October 21, 2005, he became the sole recipient of all five first prizes at the 15th International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition* in Warsaw, taking First Prize and the polonaise, mazurka, sonata, and concerto prizes. According to ABC News, one of the judges, Professor Piotr Paleczny, said that Blechacz "so outclassed the remaining finalists that no second prize could actually be awarded." Another judge, the distinguished Irish pianist John O'Conor, said "He is one of the greatest artists I have had a chance to hear in my entire life," according to PBS.
.
* Note: This competition is held every five years. There are initially 200 successful applicants chosen; these are whittled down to six finalists.
.
.
If you never "got" Chopin--if you never thought you liked his music--go out of your way to hear this young man. (If you have already discovered the glory of Chopin, here is a chance to double down.)
.
.
Coda: there are several performances by Rafal Blechacz of Frederic Chopin's music on YouTube, specifically at--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHV0ByoaKF0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh_7bdVICqQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBY4KzMM8Qw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMI62SBiQBM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L28aSoUfp6Q

etc.

Perhaps I should also mention--for clarification of the fact that the piano competition was held in Warsaw although Chopin is French by reputation--that he was born in Poland (and is considered a great Polish national treasure) but transplanted by circumstance to Paris (the massive Russian-forced Polish emigration) at age 20; he died at 36.
.

WikiLeaks

.
by Richard Crews
.
The publication of millions of classified military and diplomatic documents from around the world on WikiLeaks is big, BIG news.

Enormous efforts are being made to weed out specific ID that would lead to people getting killed--and these efforts will be inadequate to some extent--and to phase and batch the output so it is not completely overwhelming.

But this is the most politically and sociologically important event in years--greater than the "Rodney King Patrols" when a lot of people started carrying loaded video cameras to try to bust police acts of brutality, and comparable to the worldwide smart-phone use at civil rights and political demonstrations.

Governments of the people, by the people, and for the people around the world claim to value accountability and transparency. Now they get a chance to prove it--to get their noses rubbed in their own excrement.
.

U. S. Incarceration

.
by Richard Crews
.
The United States has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. The U.S. incarcerates a greater proportion of its citizens than any other country in the world--including Russia, China, and Cuba. It incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other democracy or dictatorship; more than any Asian, African, or European nation; more than any long-standing government or new, emerging one.

Compared with other leading, industrialized, first-world countries such as the U.K., Germany, France, Canada, or Japan, the U.S. incarcerates a ten-times higher proportion of its citizens than any of those countries.

Last year the U.S. passed an alarming milestone: there are now more than three million U.S. citizens under restraint within the multi-teered (federal, state, and local) penal systems. This amounts to roughly one in every one hundred of our fellow citizens.

Why? There are essentially two reasons: First--sentences in the U.S. tend to be much longer than those for comparable crimes in other first-world countries. A crime such as bank robbery which typically draws a sentence of 6 to 12 months in many European countries may call for a sentence of 15 to 20 years in the U.S. Second--the vast majority of incarcerated U.S. citizens are being held for so-called "non-violent" or "victimless" crimes. In fact, most are for drug-related offenses.

The U.S. once tried a terrible experiment in prohibition. From 1920 to 1933 the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal in the U.S. Despite massive enforcement efforts, beer, wine, and whiskey continued to be readily available throughout the U.S.; organized crime flourished on the profits. The current situation with regard to illegal drugs is comparable to this prohibition experience.

Today, there are several places in the world where drugs are legal--the personal use and transport of small quantities of narcotics is not against the law. Contrary to popular predictions, this has not led to tourist-drug havens nor to significant public or personal health problems. But a politicized culture of fear has led to harsh anti-drug legislation and sentencing practices throughout the U.S.

This has led to an overcrowding of the prison systems. In conjunction with this there is little rehabilitation--neither education nor resocialization efforts--within the systems. Moreover, even after release, an ex-felon often has trouble finding a job or a place to live since most employers will not hire an ex-felon and many landlords will not rent to someone with a prison record. In many places there are even laws restricting employment, housing, or other activities of ex-felons--near schools, for example. So in addition to having been isolated and kept out of touch with cultural and technology changes--perhaps for many years--ex-felons are stigmatized and restricted in attempts to rejoin society.

What needs to be done? Three things.

* First, laws need to be changed so that the prohibition against personal transport and use of drugs is repealed. In addition, harsh sentencing practices for illegal manufacturers and dealers should be revised.

* Second, there should be extensive education, job training, and other rehabilitation and socialization programs for anyone in jail; the economics (tax and program funding aspects) of this turn out to be surprisingly favorable.

* Third, there should be extensive, positive job, housing, and other programs to help ex-felons rejoin society after discharge. In addition to programs in road and parkland maintenance, there are many activities within recycling, "remanufacture" (of damaged and recycled items), organic and community gardens, and other fields which could provide valuable services to the community at large, could offer ex-felons gainful employment (at menial up through administrative and high-level jobs), and would not compete unreasonably with commercial businesses.
.

Beauty in Scientific Theories

.
by Richard Crews
.
I want to start by acknowledging that "beauty" is a hard word--a hard concept--to define. Surely there is a subjective aspect. (I am reminded of my dear friend Lorenzo in Texas--one of the brightest and most smooth-sailing-through-a-complex-life sociopaths I have ever met--who had a particular affinity for very fat women; I find them ugly and unhealthy looking. He finally married one who was perhaps 5 foot 2 and 300 pounds. He even had a couple of kids with her--both of whom were born addicted to cocaine, and both of whom were taken away from an obviously unhealthy home by Social Services by the time they were a couple of months old. But I digress.)

In conjunction with its subjectivity, the "Aunt Tilly Principle" certainly applies: "beauty" (like my Aunt Tilly) is hard to "define" but easy to recognize.

Not only does "beauty" mean different things to different people, but there are even severe variations between the lexicons of standardized usages. In this regard, for example, one might be surprised to find the word "beauty" associated with "science" and suspect that in science "beauty" does not mean the same thing it means in architecture, poetry, or music.

Given those caveats, in the words of the great historian Will Durant who said (in the introduction to The Lessons of History that only a fool would attempt to summarize the eleven huge volumes of his [and his wife Ariel's] The Story of Civilization in 100 pages), "I proceed."

"Beauty" is defined as the quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality. Beauty is a quality or feature that is most effective, gratifying, or telling.

Another word that sometimes subs for "beauty" in trying to capture the illusive aesthetics of scientific theory is "elegance." "Elegance" is defined as refinement, grace, and beauty in movement, appearance, or manners; tasteful opulence in form, decoration, or presentation.

Now to the question, where does beauty come into scientific theory? Let me begin with a startling quotation by Paul Dirac, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who was central to the development of quantum mechanics. "I might tell you the story I heard from Schrodinger of how, when he first got the idea for this equation [the famous and seminal Schrodinger Wave Equation], he immediately applied it to the behavior of the electron in the hydrogen atom, and then he got results that did not agree with experiment.... That, of course, was a great disappointment to Schrodinger, and it caused him to abandon the work for some months.... I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment."

Karl Popper, philosopher of science, defined four criteria for a theory to be scientifically "strong": it must be parsimonious, falsifiable, and have explanatory and predictive utility. The last three of these are not hard to understand. "Explanatory utility": the theory must be useful in explaining past observations. "Predictive utility": it must be useful in predicting the results of experiments or observations yet to be made. "Falsifiable": there must be ways of testing it and, if it is wrong, proving that it is wrong. (This is the main reason that the "theories" of creationism or "intelligent design" are not scientific: they can never be proved wrong--whatever observations appear, they are just there because God did it that way. And as you can readily see, creationism and ID also have no predictive utility.)

But the fourth criterion, parsimoniousness, is a puzzler. Essentially it says that for a theory to be scientifically strong, it should be short and sweet. The quintessential example of this is Einstein's equation relating mass and energy: E equals M C-squared (the energy bound up in a physical object is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light).

It is an interesting reflection on the functioning of the human mind--its struggles and frustrations, its satisfactions and triumphs--that the more complicated and convoluted a theory is--the more it lacks elegance and beauty--the harder it is for it to hold its head up in the halls of science.
.