Category: Commentary

AI

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

To borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky, “you may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is interested in you.” It’s hard to avoid the subject of artificial intelligence, or AI, today. It’s all over the news, with bold predictions of how it will change everything. AI stocks are super hot, and China and the United States are in a chip race based on AI requirements. States, cities, and companies are building vast server farms to feed AI, spiking energy demand at exactly the same moment we’re supposed to be transitioning to electric vehicles! Much of what you hear is hype (no surprise), and you may be old enough (like me) to think, “well that will be somebody else’s problem with which to deal.” But probably not. However AI plays out, it will affect you within a few years, so it may be worth it to understand a little about AI now. Here goes:

I. AI is artificial, but it is not intelligence.

Some of the results AI programs can produce may look almost magical, but in the end, they result from a simple process. Everything called AI today is based on computer coding of large language models (LLMs). What is that? You already know that computers use “ones” and “zeros” (or digits, hence the digital world) to do everything they do. These large language models take words and turn them into tokens, or groups of ones/zeros. The base language doesn’t matter, which is why LLMs can work wonders with translations. What the program does is take the tokens (words in your view) and predict what the next token should be. The prediction uses a probability model (ok, no more math) that says, “based on what I have been trained on, what should the next word be?”

As a simple example, if you trained a LLM on the works of Shakespeare, then you asked it to describe “love,” the LLM would say things like, “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” or “when love speaks, the voice of all the gods make heaven drowsy with the harmony.” Beautiful, no? Now if you added the lyrics from the J. Geils band to the model’s learning, it might say “love stinks.” Which answer it gives is based on how many times it sees that particular combination of words, and who says it, and how.

But wait a second, we’re falling into a trap by using phrases like “it says” or “it sees.” It does nothing of the sort. The model searches its repository of data and pulls out all the tokens which represent “love” then looks at the tokens surrounding that token, then puts them together to respond to you. There is no thought involved. But how does it get such amazing textual answers?

The key is feeding the model more and more data. Companies started using things like Wikipedia, but that isn’t enough. Now they’re scraping public social media, ingesting copyrighted material, anything to get more data. Because the more data that your AI model uses to train on, the better the results you get. One problem AI faces is recency bias. In the rush to add ever more sources, developers turn to today’s data. Almost no one is creating original data from the 19th century, while the Kardashians probably provide a megabyte a minute. AI will lean ever more heavily on recent data for learning, which negates one of the lessons of history: the things that are best are those which stand the test of time. AI does not care about “right” and “wrong,” just “fit.”

II. AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

The use of tools is the story of humanity, from fire to the wheel to flight to computers. Tools are neither good nor evil; it is all about how you use them. A steak knife can cut a filet or a jugular vein. Alfred Nobel thought TNT would revolutionize mining and engineering. So there is no reason to fear AI, but there are many reasons to learn about it.

Like any tool, AI requires some initial effort on your part to work properly. If you don’t learn to use it through practice, you’ll find it too hard to use (the story of me and typing, as my two-finger approach can attest!). Also, AI benefits from you, as another source of learning. AI programs learn how you speak, how you think, what you expect from interactions with you, and then can respond better to you. Of course, that also opens the door to manipulation, too. Current AI developers are not consciously trying to program AI to be “addictive,” but that is a real possibility.

As a tool, AI most benefits those who can master it. Regular AI users point out that if you ask AI a stupid or poorly-worded question, it may give you a similar answer! Why? Not even the developers know for sure. There is no way to “open the hood” and look at what the model is doing; it is just “doing.” Another mind-blowing fact: AI developers have noticed the AI programs seem to work more slowly and are less productive during December. The developers think the AI has “internalized” the notion of a holiday season from its data, and answers accordingly.

III. AI can do many things for you, but maybe not better than you.

Since it is ultimately simply a computer program, AI is fantastic at taking over mundane or routine work. It never tires, never sleeps, never asks for a raise. Computer programmers love it, as “coding” often involves reams of simple instructions which are boring to write, but perfect to be automated. AI is great at giving you choices. Remember how great it was when you first googled “synonyms for” and found a ton of great alternatives? Now you can ask AI to take a paragraph you wrote and give you five different and better alternatives, and milliseconds later, you have them. AI assistants can “look over your shoulder” as you work on an email, for example, and tell you that your tone is harsh or you’ve mixed up the dates you’ve asked for the work to be completed.

What do you do better than AI? Probably the things at which you are best. The initial AI efforts wrote about as well as a sixth-grader. Current models are working at the undergraduate-level. AI will continue to advance, but it will never replace human expertise. For one thing, its data is based on human expertise, so it needs humans to continue pushing the limits of science, art, philosophy and the like in order to provide the “tokens” AI uses. So a very good lawyer may use AI to do research, or to hone a closing argument, but she will not be replaced by AI. Because AI also “hallucinates.” (Notice how we anthropomorphize AI? we have to talk about it a living, thinking “thing” just to make sense of it!).

There are great examples of this. Remember how AI “guesses” the next word? In most legal briefs, you’ll find the phrase “according to the case of X vs Y, . . .” AI “knows” it should use these tokens when you ask it a legal question, but if it can’t find the right citation, it will simply invent one! To AI, these are the right “tokens” to use, but to us, it’s just plain making things up. Since it has no free will, the AI developers call it hallucinating, since what AI does makes sense to it, but not in the real world.

AI can also be manipulated. Perhaps you heard about Google’s AI called Gemini, which started generating images of black Nazis, Asian Vikings, and Indian Romans. How did that happen. AI generated tokens to create images, but a developer put a filter in the program to make the images it created “more diverse.” So AI promptly ignored reality and made black Nazis. These problems are easy to correct, but demonstrate how AI can go wrong.

Now that’s diversity in action! (from the New York Times)

Positive counter examples exist in the world of medicine. AI can look at hundreds of millions of CAT scans and never tires, never has a headache or eye-strain. A good technician will still beat AI, but AI can serve as an initial screening tool or a post facto double-check. AI can also look at large bodies of medical data and find correlations which individual doctors might never see. Likewise, AI is looking at the development of thousands of ways to fold protein molecules into amino acids and thereby make treatments for various illnesses and conditions. Such work, even with modern supercomputers, would have taken decades.

IV. AI is coming, like it or not.

AI is part of the ongoing digital revolution, which means it happens at a pace with which we humans just aren’t prepared to deal. We have gone from the beta (testing) version of AI to level 4.0 in about ten years, and the trend is accelerating. Unlike the flying cars we were all promised in the 1960s, or the electric vehicle revolution which is always just around the corner, AI is already creeping into many things, whether you realize it or not.

Computers were supposed to replace mundane tasks, and they did put typists out of a job, but then coders became a thing. Now coders are in danger, and even so-called “white collar” workers are being reviewed. If you’re average or below average at your white-collar job (and half of people are, by definition), your boss will be considering whether an AI program could easily replace you. AI is seeping into service centers, the places where someone from India tried to convince you they were in Cincinnati and really wanted to help you. AI can make travel recommendations, edit papers, even “teach.” As it does so, there will be examples of really excellent AI efforts that are astoundingly successful, and others which are complete busts.

What cannot be denied is that the level of investment going on in the AI field, the development of the data sources and the research into better ways for AI to learn mean it will continue to affect you, personally, whether you realize it or not.

V. AI will exacerbate inequality.

As much as humans are a learning species, it is amazing that we always convince ourselves this next tool will be all to the good. Mark Zuckerberg thought Facebook would be a place for people to connect and become “friends.” This despite his original intent was to create a site for guys to rate girls on their “attractiveness.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google worked under the motto, “Don’t be evil,” despite the fact illegal child porn was immediately one of the top search functions.

The internet writ large didn’t make humans smarter, despite making all the world’s knowledge instantly searchable. It did allow neo-Nazis, perverts, and fraudsters a chance to meet and grow. All that information devolves into cat videos, Tindr, and scams. AI will be no different. A good writer will perfect an even better paragraph or story. A scam artist, a better pitch, customized just to you. A good priest, a better sermon. A crank, a more inviting screed against whatever. For every medical breakthrough, there will be fake-news causing unnecessary death or illness.

The power of AI will enable people to do great and terrible things. Those who better understand AI will be better at using it, and far better at avoiding it using them.

Spring Forward !?!?!

America just went through its annual rite of passage, jumping forward to daylight saving time. It is always accompanied by another round of complaints, confusion, and protest. Americans have so little to argue about, it’s a good thing they still have this (sarcastic font). In the end, it’s all a battle about sunlight, when you get it, and what you call it.

Let’s start with the basics. The amount of daylight one receives daily depends primarily on one’s latitude (a north-south measure). At the equator, it’s twelve hours daily, always. As you move north or south, days become increasingly longer (in summer) or shorter (in winter). The seasonal daylight change is actually due to the Earth’s inclination (tilt), but let’s not introduce astronomy, ok? So there’s little reason to fool with the clocks for lands near the equator, as the amount of sunlight at say 7:00 am is roughly the same, January through December. But as you move toward the poles and light becomes dearer in the dreary winter, your children will be waiting for the school bus in the dark, or you will be driving home from work at night. Likewise, plentiful Summer daylight could be wasted in bed, so the idea was born to simply change what we call the time to adjust that variable to when the sunlight is available.

Next subject is geography. Most countries lie in a single time zone. It is an odd coincidence that most countries are either roughly square or taller (north-south) than wider. While they may switch from standard to daylight saving times (and back) during the year, the whole country is affected uniformly. If your nation fits snugly into a time zone, the fact it gets dark at 5:00 pm in one city and 5:15 in another and 5:30 in a third is hardly worth arguing about.

The major exceptions to this rule are the United States, Canada, Russia, China, and Australia, which span multiple times zones. Russia spans the most (nine), followed by Canada (five and a half!), China (should be four, but is one), the continental USA (four) and Australia (three). Which of these things is not like the other? Only in the US is the population spread out both across and within the time zones. Russia and Australia have the bulk of their people in a single time zone and vast relatively unpopulated other time zones. China is likewise, but simply mandates everyone be on “Beijing time.” Screw you, Xinjiang if dawn is at 11:00 am! Canada has population spread, but is still relatively sparse. In three of the four continental US time zones, there are several large cities on different (east-west) sides of a single time zone. Which means there are many people who will be advantaged or disadvantaged by being in the same time zone. When you try to make the bus stop happen in daylight in Boston, the commute home in Detroit is pitch dark, or vice versa). That is the simple reason it’s always been a contentious issue in the US, especially more so than in other countries.

Let’s take Mexico for example. The federal government did away with daylight saving (note there is no extra “s”) time last year. Mexico has four time zones, with the bulk of the population being in the Mexico City time zone. Quintana Roo (home of Cancún and the other resorts) mirrors US Eastern time, as that is where the bulk of its tourist business lives. Likewise, the Mexican border states mirror their northern cousins, switching or not to simplify travel and trade across the border. Mexico is in the tropics, so the real daylight change is between one and two hours at most, so no one is terribly disadvantaged and time doesn’t become a contentious issue.

Why do we even change times? It started as a wartime experiment when the US adopted it in 1918 during WWI. The idea was to economize on power and fuel by adjusting times so war industry workers had access to the most daylight in Summer. No one has ever definitively proved any real advantage to it, however. The initial opposition was attributed to farmers who complained about messing with Mother Nature, but this is probably apocryphal, since farmers work on natural schedules, and don’t care whether city folk call dawn 5:00 am or 6:00 am; it’s just when the animals need feeding.

Another silly argument to dispense with is based on the recurrent studies which show negative health effects from time changes. These are what is known as correlation–not causation–effects, meaning two things vary together but one does not cause another. If you ever heard the phrase “what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” the meaning of that obscure saying is that you can find many variables that increase or decrease together, but no one should then assume one causes the other to change. How do we know there is no direct causation? If there was a causation between time changes and major negative health outcomes, the millions of business people and tourists who fly across the Atlantic and Pacific every day would be dying in droves. It doesn’t happen, so there is no causation, just correlation. What does happen is jet lag, which is lousy but not fatal.

What is very real is an increase in things like accidents when driving or walking at night, so forcing commuters or children to do so costs lives. But remember, making it work in New York means it doesn’t work in Indianapolis! There are workarounds. People in Xinjiang keep Beijing time officially, but do all their scheduling on “local time.” The central time zone in Australia is on a half hour offset, as is Newfoundland & Labrador in Canada. But that involves relatively small groups of people and places without that much travel between them.

So if daylight saving time is so great, why not keep it permanently? It’s only great in Summer, when it maximizes your time outdoors in the sunshine. The US tried this in 1974, when Congress repealed the “fall back” time change during the Summer of that year , and President Nixon signed the bill into law. Seventy-five percent of American supported the measure. When Winter came, the new Summer-focused time failed miserably (darkness for school busses, for example), leading to a massive change in public opinion and the repeal of the repeal by then-President Ford in October, 1974.

Time doesn’t have to change. Time changes probably don’t save power, or fuel, but they also don’t make you sick. What they do, do, is maximize your access to plentiful sunlight in both Summer and Winter. If that’s important to you, embrace DST. Or move to Singapore. But please stop complaining!

Ecce Homo

I have heard it said that nothing brings home one’s mortality more than the death of one’s last remaining parent. You now stand at the door, looking into the abyss, with no comforting generational buffer between you and eternity. My Dad just passed on, but I don’t feel that way at all. I have many emotions: I am sad for the grief I sense in my wife, my children and grandchildren, and my siblings. I am relieved that Dad’s suffering is at an end. I am grateful for the life and upbringing he (and my Mom) gave me. Mostly I am proud of the Man he was.

Charles William Neary, Chuck (but never, ever “Chucky,”) was the eldest child of Charles Joseph and Loretta (Vollrath) Neary. He was born on June 4th, 1929, and he liked to insist the market crash was not his doing. That was Chuck, always quick with a quip. If he didn’t invent the concept of “dad jokes” he almost certainly perfected it.

The eldest of twelve siblings, he was in some respects an extra parent to the youngest ones. Like his father, he was a good enough athlete to entertain notions of being a player, but too grounded to pursue them. In the early twentieth century, boys played sports, men held jobs. He was a quick study, and even briefly attended the University of Notre Dame, but couldn’t hack working a union job at the local Bendix factory with his father, attending classes, and commuting from their home in distant LaPorte, Indiana. At the same time.

His father wanted him to stay and support the family; Chuck wanted to get married and leave. He could easily recall the epic fistfight he and his Dad had in front of the family home when he decided against his father’s will. Chuck enlisted in the Army; a way to leave with dignity while setting the stage to marry Delores. His brief stint in uniform was uneventful, and he returned to LaPorte with his bride, until the fateful day when he soon got another telegram from the War Department directing him to return to duty due to the Korean war.

GI Chuck

Chuck had learned to type in high school, so he was assigned as a personnel specialist to a division HQ. Through an accounting mis-classification, he found himself re-assigned as a combat infantryman just as the Chinese sent a million volunteers south to stop the United Nations advance. He never seemed traumatized by the months in combat, but he never talked that much about them, either. When he finally returned again to Indiana, he traded the olive drab of Army life for the navy blue of the Indiana State Police.

If the Irish cop is a stereotypical character, Chuck was straight from central casting. His had a wry sense of humor, was a quick and excellent judge of character, coupled with a friendly style that served him well. He lucked into a local starring role during the manhunt for a fugitive who killed a sheriff and eluded the police. Chuck literally chased him down in a foot race and became above-the-fold news in Chicagoland. He later helped pioneer a traffic speed enforcement program which placed police cars (driving the speed limit) abreast on highways; whoever tried to pass was arrested for speeding. One can’t print what he was called on the CB radios those days.

Sadly, he was as bad at office politics as he was good at policing. He found himself on the wrong end of several changes in leadership, stifled in his career and sometimes punished just for not taking sides. At one point, Chuck was sent to the ultimate dead-end job: the sole police officer assigned to investigate crimes within the Indiana State Prison. When I asked him once what was so bad about it, he said, “the victims are criminals, the witnesses are criminals, the perpetrators are criminals, everybody lies, and nobody really cares what happens.”

Trooper Neary

Chuck somehow survived that experience and got a fresh start as the Commanding Officer at a new post near Lowell, Indiana. He excelled in the leadership role, and eventually rose to headquarters in Indianapolis, where he was chief of investigations. He later admitted HQ was far too political a place for a no-nonsense detective like him. He retired from the force as an official “Legend of the Indiana State Police” although he continued to work security and investigatory jobs for years more.

When Delores became incapacitated after failing to rehab from a knee replacement, he became her full time care-giver. She refused a wheelchair or an electric scooter. He literally carried her around, or wheeled her from place to place in one of those chair/step-stool devices meant for home improvement jobs. He cared for her thusly till the day she died.

All those details are the stuff of his biography. They are things about him, but not him. What I could barely ever fathom was the “how” he was the “who” he was. Police work is legendarily the realm of workaholics, cops being on-call all day, every day. Yet Chuck was an omnipresent figure in my childhood: on the parish council, coaching the baseball team, running the school’s Presidential physical fitness test. At times I wished he wasn’t always around, like when he called me “Neary” so that he didn’t show any favoritism among the other team members. Perhaps the fact he often showed up in uniform was a detail I missed at the time: somehow he crammed thirty hours of activities into every twenty-four-hour day.

The man loved to drive, and he drove very fast. As a child I remember keeping tabs on how many cars he passed when we went on a long vacation drive. It exceeded a thousand. After all those years as a trooper, he was comfortable driving, and it was very hard to finally get his grip off the steering wheel. And yes, it’s genetic, just ask my daughters.

Chuck had a temper, and he could be overly strict. Between his upbringing and career, he tended to view the downside of things more than the positives: you can’t witness the worst of people and things all the time and not be affected. That manifested itself in views that were stereotypical and emblematic of his times. He fought to overcome the urge to voice thoughts which he later regretted, but you could see him struggling with the difference between what he thought and what he knew he shouldn’t say.

He was always his own man, very sure of who he was, and what he could or couldn’t do. If the man had a midlife crisis, it passed before lunch. If he pondered any existential dread, he shrugged it off with a so-what. His Catholic faith was enough for him.

He was clever, but always regretted not finishing a college degree. After a few beers on a Saturday afternoon, he once told me “being right all the time” was his biggest problem: “people resent it.” He was right about that, too. He probably didn’t realize how unusual that talent is.

In a modern twist on an Irish tradition, we loved to fight. Dad and I always engaged in battles of wits whenever we got together. Like the scene from his favorite movie “The Quiet Man,” we enjoyed the contest more than the result. I’d make an overly strong comment, Dad would object, and off we went. At times the argument would go on-and-on, each trying to find a new opening or point of attack. On more than a few occasions, we ended up completely changing sides during the argument: what mattered was the fight itself.

Chuck’s Dad died at sixty-three from a debilitating neurological disorder. The grandfather he never knew died at forty-two (kidney failure), great granddad at sixty-four (gastric ulcer). I once told him–based on our paternal history–my goal was to live to forty and anything more than that was “extra time.” Chuck lived to ninety-four, and I’m in year twenty-four of extra time. Maybe the genes aren’t all that bad.

In his final years, Chuck became a mainstay at his parish, then at his retirement community. He rediscovered his inner ham, playing the lead roles in several plays there. He found another chance at romance with Sharon, who was his companion and eventual caregiver to the end. His heart simply refused to stop beating although it declined from sixty-to-forty-to-twenty percent effective, and he needed to move into assisted living. When my sister asked him which facility he wanted to move to, he simply pointed up.

At 5:17 this past Tuesday morning, I woke up. I usually wake up around 6:00 am, a habit from years of military and government service. This was different. I went and said my morning prayers, then started my daily reading, when I got an e-mail from my brother-in-law asking that I call my sister immediately. Dad had hit the call button around 5:30, and had died shortly thereafter. I can’t help but think he gave me one last shove that morning, a little “get ready, you’re next in line.”

I loved the man, warts and all. His entire extended family, of which he was literally the paterfamilias, will miss him dearly.

Behold the Man.

A Mexican Cable Fable

One of the things making expat life such a phenomenon is the internet. No matter where you go, you can bring parts of your life with you: television shows, sports, even family connections. This access greatly mitigates the home-sickness any expat might feel living far away in a different culture. Of course the internet is (in the famous quote from the late-Senator Ted Stevens) “a series of tubes” through space. Tubes, cables, whatever. The ridiculous metaphor works on many levels, since a small series of cables is the lifeline which provides the whole world to your home. Yes, your telephone does it without cables and delivers it to the palm of your hand, but only a digital native wants to stare at a palm-sized screen all day.

When we arrived in Mexico, our first house had internet supplied by TelMex, the onetime Mexican government utility now owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. It was old-school copper, bundled with your landline, and you could get upwards of 20 Megabytes per second (mbs), enough to stream live television. Reliability was always an issue, with frequent outages and significant speed lags when more users logged in. Years behind the developed world, but good enough.

Eventually fiber optics came to Mexico. TelMex by law had to provide it to all customers, installed free of charge, but their roll-out plan was several years long. Our neighborhood paid to jump the queue, getting fiber optic cable installed early. Of course it was a classic negotiation: we had to pay to have it done, while those immediately around us declined to join in, getting the installation for free. Our neighborhood voted to go ahead, since we wanted the improved speeds (>50 mbs) and reliability. As for our other neighbors, it was just their good fortune to get access, too.

You might be wondering at the fiber optic speed, as in the States it would be in the hundreds of megabytes per second. Here, the fiber optic cable runs to a box in your neighborhood, but the last hundred feet or so are still copper cable into your house and modem, resulting in less performance. Fiber optic cable is expensive and delicate, so TelMex decided to take the performance reduction and avoid the problem of all that cable maintenance. I can’t say that I blame them. If you step on it, kink it, or otherwise molest it, fiber optic cable dies. Copper is far more resilient. You’ll see just how much more later.

Years later we moved into another house closer to the Ajijic centro, and the TelMex fiber optic was already in place there. We were all set for about a year, until the quality and the performance became unstable. It went out for days at a time, and when it worked, speeds dropped below one mbs (barely able to read e-mail) in the evening. Needless to say, television and streaming were out of the question.

We flagged down a TelMex vehicle in our neighborhood (that’s what you do here), and the technico (repairman) agreed to take a look. His instruments told him there was a signal getting through to our modem, but it was very weak, and there was something wrong down the line leading into the house. He showed me where our connection ran along our property line, then into a retaining wall and down to a junction box. The copper cable was stuck inside a broken, corroded plastic tube as protection: for all intents and purposes, it might as well have been lying on the ground. And in the junction box was a mass of extra cable, left there by the installers probably because they didn’t want to bring it back. It was a mess, and the technico couldn’t tell where the problem was, as he was primarily an “indoor” repairman, and this was clearly an “outdoor” problem. He worked for several hours identifying where the cables were, but could not help us any further. He even refused a propina (tip), as he said it was just his job. We weren’t excited about contacting TelMex for help, as we had heard plenty of stories of bad customer service.

Look closely, …
I don’t think this is up to code
Nope, certainly not right!

We had upcoming travel, so we delayed contacting TelMex. We adapted and endured for a few months. I started using the internet early in the morning, when there was sufficient bandwidth. Judy & I shared time, to make sure we both weren’t trying to use the same few mbs. We sometimes used our phones, even for hotpots, but our T-mobile unlimited international plan throttles you down to 2- or 3-G speed when you are outside the States. We made do. Finally, the internet connection went out completely, and we had to contact TelMex for help.

Judy used the app (en español) to alert them to the problem and what their technico previously had told us. She lost the chat before she completed it, and thought she may have to start over. When she did the next day, they informed her that we already had a trouble ticket and would see a repairman shortly. At least they didn’t say, “mañana.” The next day, he alerted us he was coming and arrived late in the afternoon. He confirmed we had no connection, and I showed him the cable and the junction box. He inspected the cables, and while he agreed they weren’t protected properly, he said the problem must be further up the line.

He walked along until he found the appropriate utility culvert and opened it up. Inside there was another mass of cables, and another junction box for the incoming fiber optic cable. The tunnel was full of dirt, water and an ant colony, the latter quite upset their secure complex was disturbed! The technico brushed all this off (he had seen worse, obviously) and picked up the fiber optic cable, half of which was sticking loose out of the junction box. You could see the cut open ends of the cable and the light shining through! How it got that way he didn’t know; he seemed amazed anybody in our neighborhood had internet with that connection. He told us he needed to return the next day with more equipment and a partner to help test the re-installation.

Late the next afternoon, they started in on the junction box, cleaning the leads and reconnecting the cable. After about two hours, he came up to the house to say they were done, and our internet connection should be restored. It was: a bounteous 50+ mbs! Yes, we still see pretty substantial changes in speed, and brief outages. And we’ve purchased a Starlink dish as satellite backup. And no, the TelMex workers still refused a propina.

Lessons learned? Internet access is a key component to expat life. We bank, connect to family, plan travel, and socialize using it. TelMex customer service was very good. They were willing to speak slowly in Spanish, and happy we could understand and respond. Things like internet speeds are relative, and you can live with much less than sizzling. Global internet access continues to increase. It is amazing to me we’re using the same satellite system (Starlink) as a back-up that the Ukrainian army is using to fight the Russians, but that’s the nature of technology today. Sometimes old tech like copper wires has its uses, especially if the new tech like fiber optics is fragile.

Nothing momentous, just another aspect of life as an expat.

The End of History

Most of my friends will immediately recognize this title, that of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 nonfiction book about what comes after the Cold War. When published, it was a sensation, although the number of people who actually read the magazine article summarizing it greatly exceeded those who waded through his 339 pages of dense politics and philosophy. I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Fukuyama for a private lunch one day (benefit of working in the Pentagon), so I was obliged to be in the latter group. With the benefit of that experience, I can strongly recommend the article, as the gist of his argument is there.

No, I wasn’t kidding!

Frank’s work was widely ridiculed–again, by those who never read all of it–after the 9/11 attacks. He didn’t predict an end to conflict, just the fact that the Cold War proved two things: freedom is better than authoritarianism as a governmental system, and capitalism is best at economic production. Those truths have stood the test of time since he wrote them. But those who stopped at the bumper sticker (history is over, end of story) just didn’t get it. They didn’t know history, and they were wrong because of it.

I used to think not knowing history was practically criminal. For example, I would hear people say, “why do I need to know who went to war with whom?” (they never got the who/whom part right, but that’s a different argument for a different day). I often quipped back with a quote from Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Otherwise peaceable Palestinians who lived in Gaza are suddenly realizing what happens when someone starts a ruinous war on your behalf. You don’t get to opt out, you just get to suffer. But lately I’ve decided there is something worse than not knowing history; it’s learning bad history.

See, if you don’t know something about history, you can honestly learn about it and fill in the gaps. But if you have been taught something about history that is either factually incorrect or seriously biased, you’ll continue to insist you’re correct. You will resist the correction. Several current examples suffice:

Kissinger’s War Crimes.

Henry Kissinger recently passed. To say he was controversial is an understatement, as much as it would be to say he was important. Yet most of the press coverage focused on the allegation he promoted or encouraged various war crimes. The most prominent of these charges was that he extended the Vietnam war by “carpet bombing” neutral Cambodia, killing tens of thousands and undermining the Cambodian government so that it fell to the vicious Khmer Rouge. These are three factual statements, although seriously shaded to hide the truth. Kissinger did promote the extension of the war by bombing Cambodia. Many people did die in those attacks, although the number is suspect for reasons I will explain. The Cambodian government did collapse under attack by the Khmer Rouge. What is the bias?

The main supply line between North Vietnam and the Viet Cong guerrillas in the south was the famous Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of roads and jungle paths in Cambodia which paralleled the border. Note the bolding in Cambodia. The US bombing didn’t extend the war into Cambodia; the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) extended the war into Cambodia. The US Air Force simply followed. As to casualty figures, the Air Force was largely bombing jungle trails, so it used carpet-bombing tactics. The idea that tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians were wandering these trails night after night, when they knew bombs were falling, strains credulity. While most of the people killed were just doing a job, moving things from here-to-there, they were involved in the war effort. Finally, the US went on to support a coup d’etat which replaced Cambodian King Sihanouk with General Lon Nol, but neither leader was able to resist the Khmer Rouge, who overran Phnom Penh just as the NVA overran Saigon. Cambodia’s fall was as inevitable as South Vietnam’s.

Bombing an area militarized by an opponent is not a war crime (a lesson being recalled currently in Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, and schools). Neither is killing civilians engaged in combat support efforts. And the postwar history of the Khmer Rouge demonstrates there are things worse than US meddling. Kissinger’s legacy deserves a critical assessment, but war crimes? Sorry, no.

The Nakba.

Many press reports covering the “bigger picture” of the current war in Gaza mention the Nakba. The term means catastrophe in Arabic, and it is used as a descriptive nickname for what happened to the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. As the media “contextualized” the story, the nascent Jewish state forced a little less than a million Palestinians from their homes and turned them into stateless refugees. Again, it’s a factual statement, but leaves the full truth wanting. These stories remind me of my visit to Hiroshima two decades ago. As I walked into the Peace Museum, I was struck by the story it told: on a bright, sunny day, people were going peacefully about their lives when suddenly a thousand suns exploded above them. Seriously, no mention of the war going on, the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanjing, the brutality of the Bataan death march or the various atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. Just rainbows and unicorns and BOOM. Missing something?

In a similar fashion, the Nakba was preceded by the Palestinian Arabs rejecting the UN two-state solution and joining with five Arab armies in an attempt to kill all the Jews and destroy the Israeli state. They failed and were forced to flee. At the same time, several hundred thousand Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they had lived for centuries, and they primarily went to Israel for protection. A catastrophe? Yes. Traumatic? Of course. But this is what happens when you attempt to eradicate a people and fail; they simply won’t return to the peace table until their security is ensured. But the many pro-Palestinian protests you see at American universities stem from teaching only the Nakba, not the rest. Which is why many students draw the wrong conclusions.

The 1619 project.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project is an attempt at re-evaluating all American history by tracing our roots not to 1776, but to 1619, the beginning of English chattel slavery in Virginia. The New York Times News division (not Opinion) promotes the project, suggesting they see it as historical fact, not simply an alternative view. There is an associated educational curriculum being used by primary and secondary schools across the nation. The crux of the project is that race, and specifically race-based slavery, is the appropriate prism to view the development of the United States. In the end, everything is about race. The American Revolution? Designed to protect southern slavery against the British abolitionist movement. The Second Amendment? Arms citizen-slave owners against possible slave revolts. America’s police system? Drawn from the fugitive slave patrols. America’s justice system? Incarceration of black men to prevent their development, just as in the old South. American capitalism? From the Plantations. I could go on, but you get the point.

Many professional historians have pointed out the serious fallacies in these arguments. Some proponents of the 1619 Project have backed off, suggesting they only wanted more–and more serious–consideration of race. Who can argue with that? But that’s not what they put forward. These factually wrong ideas are now out there, circulating in the young minds of America. We’ll see more incoherent and violent results in years to come.

Think not? As I wrote this post, the Economist covered a new poll of Americans 18-29. Not youths, young adults. Twenty percent thought the Holocaust was a myth. Another thirty percent couldn’t say whether the Holocaust was a myth (or not). And the results didn’t adjust by education: that is, having an American college degree didn’t make you more knowledgeable about the truth. How could that be? Secondary school history curriculum is perfunctory, and if you cover the Nakba, are you going to cover the Holocaust? It gets worse in college, where educators increasingly teach critical theory focused on oppressers-and-oppressed, leaving Israel in the former group. Which begets the ill-informed pro-Hamas rallies on today’s campuses.

Want to argue whether Henry Kissinger’s narrow focus on the Cold War was brilliant or myopic? Worthwhile. Does the Israeli war against Hamas end up radicalizing more Palestinians than there are now? Good question. What is the lasting effect of slavery on modern America? Start the debate! The examples I cite aren’t designed to illuminate, but to confuse. They stake out extreme positions, lacking context or just being plain wrong.

War & Morality

As I write this, Israel is pounding the Gaza strip with munitions, and starting its ground offensive into the tiny, heavily-urbanized area. Several Arab states, news networks, and pro-Palestinian groups have already called these actions “war crimes.” Others have stated the current conflict must take account of the decades of Israeli “occupation” of formerly Palestinian territory, as well as the degraded treatment of the Palestinian people therein. The UN Secretary General opined people need to understand “the context” of the current war. A US State Department employee resigned in protest over the US provision of weapons to Israel, citing the fact such weapons “could be used for war crimes.” And even the President of the United States, while maintaining total support for Israel’s right to self-defense, has voiced “concerns” over the conduct of ground operations in the Gaza strip.

The Catholic theologians (and Saints) Augustine and Thomas Aquinas put forward the basic principles of Just War theory, Augustine in the 5th century later embellished by Aquinas in the 12th. Those principles have stood the test of time, being codified in various international treaties and conventions. There are two fundamental questions: whether the war itself is “just” and whether the war is being conducted “justly.” The points are independent: you can fight a just war unjustly, and you can fight an unjust war justly. Let’s examine whether Israel is engaged in a just war, and whether it is conducting it “justly.”

The principles of a just war (jus ad bellum, for those who had Latin inflicted upon them) are thus:

  • Just Cause. The damage inflicted by the aggressor must be lasting, grave and certain. Here there is little doubt that the terror attack of October 7th qualifies.
  • Proper Authority. War may only be declared by a legitimate government on behalf of its people. The Israeli administration at the moment of the attacks was quite divisive, but in a true show of support, all sides formed a national unity government to declare and conduct the war.
  • Right Intention. The purpose of the war must be the stated intention, not masking another motivation. This is always tricky. The stated purpose of Israel’s war is to eliminate Hamas, and that would qualify as just. Some claim Israel really wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, or kill Palestinians, citing remarks by some Israeli officials. The final answer here must wait, but the stated intent suffices in the meantime.
  • Last resort. All peaceful alternatives must be exhausted, ineffective, or impractical. Given that Israel has left Hamas to run Gaza for more than a decade of missile barrages and terror attacks, resulting in only more of the same, this point is met.
  • Proportionality. The good achieved must not be outweighed by the harm done. Another tricky one. Ending Hamas’ reign of terror for Israel AND for the Palestinians in Gaza is a pretty big deal, but it can’t come at the cost of destroying all of Gaza, either. Israel has not suggested the latter, so they again meet the standard. But it must also be understood that this criterion is not some absolute check on military force: there is no such thing as a hostage-veto or an innocent victim-veto on war.
  • Probability of success. There must be a reasonable chance of achieving the war’s stated purpose. Few doubt the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) abilities here; many question the relative costs.

By these standards, Israel is engaging in a just war. This determination can be reviewed, for example, if a secret Israeli memo came to light calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people rather than simply Hamas. But claiming this is their intent is insufficient.

But is Israel conducting this war justly? Here are the criteria for fighting a war justly (jus in bello):

From the New York Times: Dark orange represents new strikes by IDF
  • Discrimination. Armies should fight armies, and strive not to intentionally inflict harm on non-combatants. The IDF directed Palestinians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza strip. While many humanitarian organizations decried the 48 hour deadline Israel announced, in fact the IDF waited weeks before ground operations commenced. Notifying civilians where they should not be also tells Hamas where the attack will come, so the IDF has gone above and beyond initially. Compare that to Hamas, which ordered Palestinians to stay in place. What about the thousands of IDF strikes in Gaza since the October 7th terrorist attack? Hamas (and other groups) have continued to launch rockets and missiles in response, so they retain some offensive capability. Video footage shows the results, but also attests to the fact that the Israelis are using precision-strike munitions to take down individual buildings. Even the pattern of destruction demonstrates the bombings are part of a coordinated effort to assist the ground operation, establish a new buffer zone, and isolate Hamas fighters, all legitimate targets. So the IDF is currently meeting this standard for fighting justly.
  • Due proportion. Combatants must use only the means necessary to achieve their objectives. This principle is best explained at the extreme. For example, the IDF almost certainly has tactical nuclear weapons. They could blast Hamas and the entire Gaza strip into nothingness with a round or two, accomplishing their stated objective of eliminating Hamas but at an inhumane cost in innocent life. In the real world, this principle is much more debatable. What about the 8,000+ (and growing) list of Palestinians who have already been killed since October 7th? First off, this total is supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Many aid agencies claim that past data provided by Hamas has been accurate. There are two problems with this claim. First, the data does not indicate if the deceased were members of Hamas: so it mixes innocent civilians with legitimate military targets. Second, this same ministry immediately blamed the IDF for the explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, claiming 500 people died. The ministry provided no evidence of the casualties, nor of the bomb. Subsequent analysis by several news organizations and the US Intelligence Community concluded the explosion was not an IDF strike, was most likely caused by a malfunctioning Palestinian rocket, and the casualty counts were inflated.

During the initial attack on October 7th, over 1,200 Jews were killed and over 4,200 were injured. Even accepting the Hamas data, the IDF has thus far met the standard of proportionality. The debate about proportionality will be an ongoing one as the war continues.

Even if Israel has met the technical standards for starting a just war and is currently fighting it justly, what about the larger claims of Israeli occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinians? Much is made of the Israeli total blockade of Gaza. However, international law permits Israel to ensure no military resources enter Gaza, and Hamas admits it has food and fuel stockpiles which it is not sharing with the Palestinians. Hamas has also rejected US and Israeli offers of humanitarian aid. Likewise, Israel does not control the flow of refugees out of Gaza; Egypt does, as does Hamas. No Arab nation has (as of yet) agreed to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza. One further point which merits consideration: Hamas has denied that its attackers committed any atrocities on October 7th, despite video evidence to the contrary. Hamas further claims that “average Palestinians” rose up on October 7th and took revenge on the Jews, committing the atrocities shown in the videos. So those who claim Hamas is trustworthy must admit that “average Palestinians” perhaps are not as peace-loving as depicted by some. Finally, Hamas admits it holds hundreds of innocent hostages in violation of international law.

From the New York Times: Blue arrows show initial IDF advances. The red line at the bottom is the wadi el Gaza, a marshy area which divides the Gaza strip

How will the IDF ground attack play out? As this map shows, the IDF will most likely occupy the area around the wadi al Gaza, which splits the Gaza strip in two. They will then reduce (military term) the area north of the wadi by destroying any remaining Hamas fighters, who will be cut-off from Hamas supplies and leadership south of the wadi. Once Hamas in this area is destroyed, Israel will declare this northern half of Gaza as a demilitarized zone under international authority (probably inviting the UN to administer it). Palestinians would be invited to return to this area, after being checked for Hamas affiliation. Israel will establish a new border zone, probably about two kilometers into the Gaza strip, which the IDF will treat as a free-fire zone complete with mines, obstacles, and walls (several layers). Any person or thing moving into this zone will be targeted and eliminated. All this could take months.

What happens after that depends on how the first phase goes. Does Israel then reduce the southern portion of Gaza, up to the Egyptian border? If the first phase went well, with fewer casualties and destruction, perhaps so. Does Israel invite non-Hamas Palestinians from the southern portion of Gaza to return? Does it give Hamas safe passage out, as it did with Yassir Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization when Israel besieged them in Beirut in 1982? If there is widespread destruction and international outrage, perhaps the Israeli government chooses this option. And once Hamas is gone and the threat Gaza posed neutralized, the Israeli government has a lot of soul-searching to do about its failure to anticipate the attack, to respond quickly and to come to grips with how Jewish or secular a nation it chooses to be. Certainly the Netanyahu government faces an accounting.

What of the Palestinians in Gaza? It is true that peace cannot be achieved by the Israeli eradication of Hamas. Peace can only happen when Palestinian leaders are honest with their own people and accept the following, which are all facts on the ground:

  • Israel is a Jewish state, and it has a right to exist.
  • Because of its long history of violent resistance, a future Palestinian state must be demilitarized, and may not be a base for attacks against Israel.
  • Jerusalem will remain a part of (and the capital city of) Israel, while peaceful Muslims will be free to worship at the al-Aqsa mosque complex.
  • Eventually, the strong, militarized border between Israel and Palestine may become more like a normal border between normal countries.

That’s it. If the Palestinians had accepted the initial UN offer, they would have had much more, including part of Jerusalem. If they had accepted the Oslo accords in 1993, they might have avoided the walls which now enclose them. If Gazans had not turned to Hamas, they would have avoided the destruction which now engulfs them. At every inflection point, the Palestinian people have made the wrong choice. Here’s a prayer they finally make the right choice now.

Death and its Day

We’re rapidly approaching November, and with it, the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls, which are better known locally as Dia de Muertos. No doubt you’ve seen the iconic imagery of Mexican culture: catrinas, calaveras, ofrendas, family picnics in the cemetery featuring foods the dearly departed enjoyed while in this earthly life, and of course cempasuchil petals everywhere.

A catrina, from a Diego Rivera mural

To the outsider, all this can appear a little, well, ghoulish. But it reflects a deep-seated Mexican (and Catholic) view of the world that I would suggest is something of a corrective to the one most Americans hold. Permit me to explain.

Colorful calaveras

First off, let’s do away with the growing, anhistorical proposition that the practices of Dia de Muertos reflects ancient Mexica (you know them as Aztec) beliefs. This was first posited during the 1930s as part of the indigenismo movement, accentuating Mexica themes in local culture. The socialist government of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas promoted these efforts as a counterweight to the Catholic Church’s power. It’s true the “Aztecs” performed ancestor-worship and believed human remains, especially bones, had magic powers. They often built racks of skulls of those sacrificed to demonstrate their power. And they had not one, but eight solemn days of remembrance, including two full months. None of which coincided with Dia de Muertos. I hesitate to consider what an Azteca Dia de Muertos celebration might include, but all other such celebrations involved live human sacrifice!

An ofrenda (altar) with pan de muerto

What did coincide with the dates, as well as the parties, dances, costumes, altars, etc. were the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls. You don’t need to be an anthropologist to understand this; just travel to any Catholic country in the Mediterranean (not the least, España!) and you’ll see many festivals directly mirroring what goes on in Mexico. I’ve witnessed this false history phenomenon many times: with respect to Easter, Christmas and its trees, even the Camino de Santiago. Yes, some pagans in antiquity walked to Finisterre, as it was known as land’s end (or the end of the world). That hardly makes the Camino Frances a pagan tradition. Anyway . . .

What does Dia de Muertos tell us about Mexican culture, and why do I think it’s a lesson worth learning? Dia de Muertos rejects the notion that the dead are gone. They may not be here, among us in ways we can see, but they are somewhere; they still exist. They enjoy watching us, they appreciate it when we remember them, they take comfort in our successes and feel sad in our sorrows. This is a deeply comforting notion, not the least of which when joined with the notion that someday we will be reunited.

You can never have too many Marigolds (cempasuchil)

None of this whitewashes the truth of the deceased’s lives. They are remembered, warts and all, in the hope they have made it to heaven and eternal joy. It is incumbent on Christian believers to hope in the resurrection of the just, even for the worst of all sinners, as that portends well for our own souls!

This emphasis on a hereafter could lead to a certain fatalism, and I have heard gringos opine as much about Mexican culture. It’s true that Mexicans can get less upset about things that would enrage most folks from NOB. If you believe this life is all there is, you will both fear death and try to seize every moment of the life you have. This might lead one to fight every injustice, be more charitable, and seek to be a positive change. It might also lead to constant competition, thrill-seeking, and a winner-take-all mentality. I’ll let my good friends decide which they think is more prevalent today in America.

Mexican culture clearly feels differently. They don’t fear death, as the candy skulls and skeletal face-painting clearly attest. No tragedy in the world is off-limits to Mexican jokes, as a simple search on the internet will show. I won’t give an example, just to avoid upsetting any of my friends, but it’s very Mexican to laugh at misfortune, even deadly misfortune. Mexicans didn’t invent the slogan “stuff happens” (safe-for-family version), but they certainly live by it. The catrinas you see today began as a nineteenth century literary tradition, where living famous people were given a short, rhymed poem announcing the clever or ironic way they died. Think of a corrupt politician whose safe full of ill-gotten gains falls on him, or a glutton who chokes on a large bite of sausage.

The concept of life and its aftermath pervades all aspects of Mexican culture. See the legions of roadside shrines, carefully maintained by families and road crews alike, attesting to the death of a pedestrian. Stroll among the families sharing time together at the cemetery, remembering past generations. Watch the faithful crawl on bloodied knees across the pavement outside the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, praying for the repose of a loved one’s soul. It’s very real and very important to them.

Gringos ask things like, “Why don’t they do something to improve the safety of the pedestrian crossings?” “Why don’t they spend that money on educating their children instead of flowers for an ofrenda?” “Why do they still believe in such superstitions?” Hearing such things, most Mexicans would simply nod and smile, because by asking the questions, you show you don’t get it. There can be no answer, if you think this is all there is.

Mexicans, even those who no longer practice Catholicism, believe differently. And they live according to those beliefs. They are less acquisitive, less competitive (except with respect to futbol!), more likely to accept bad outcomes rather than rage at them. It’s not fatalism, because it doesn’t signify giving up, just accepting reality. What’s funny is, much of western therapeutic practice tells those who undergo trauma the first thing you have to do is learn to accept it. Mexican culture has that built-in: cheaper, quicker, happier.

While Disney has lately made a hash of its great tradition, I strongly recommend the animated movie “Coco” which even my Mexican friends cite as a fantastically good and true depiction of this aspect of Mexican culture. Warning: I’ve seen it about six times, and I have yet to get through the movie without tearing up. Just sayin’!

So before you go out and buy that Barbie & Ken-themed Halloween outfit, take a moment to remember those you might have forgotten. And for Dia de Muertos this year, pull Coco up and enjoy!

Gaza Delenda Est

Back in the second century BCE (Before Christian Era), Carthage was a city state on what is now the Tunisian coast. It was the predominant maritime power in the Mediterranean Sea, a commercial and culture powerhouse. Rome was a local upstart at the time, but after the First and Second Punic Wars, it became clear that only one of them could remain. Cato the Elder, a famous Roman politician in the Republic, saw this more clearly than anyone else. He started using the catch phrase, “Carthago delenda est,” as an all-purpose sign-off in his speeches in the Senate, regardless of topic. In the phrase’s several variations, it translates as “Carthage must be destroyed.” Rome finally did that in 146 BCE.

You can still visit today!

After the Second World War, the United Nations (UN) recognized the enormity (note the correct use of the term) of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people, and decided to establish a Jewish homeland where Jews everywhere could be safe. The UN did not give Israel to the Jews. There were Jews there since the Romans last tried to eradicate them in 135 CE (Christian Era). After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the Romans razed Jerusalem and sold the Jewish people off to slavery, dispersing them across the empire. The Romans did a lot of that. They so wanted to eliminate all traces of Jewish culture, they made up a new name for the area; Syria Palestina. The name used by the Arab peoples living in the region today is a vestige of that almost-successful Jewish eradication.

When the UN partitioned then-Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states in 1947, the Jews celebrated a new homeland. Within days, six Arab national armies invaded, leading to a war of military units versus ad hoc groups of armed Jews. There were battles, terrorism, and reprisals. Somehow Israel survived. Twenty years of antagonism, terrorism, and bloodshed ensued. Israel realized there would be no peace with these Arab states until they gave up their publicly-stated goal to eradicate the Jewish nation. In 1967, Israel learned another war was being planned, and they struck first routing the Arab forces and capturing Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Jews were once again free to pray at the Western Wall, a right they had been denied by the Arab leaders since 1947. But the existential threat remained, called to the world’s attention by the terrorist murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

In 1973, the Arab nations once again tried a surprise attack, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. This war went well for the Arabs for days, but the tide turned and Israel so decisively destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian forces that only threats by the Soviet Union to the United States (and subsequent US pressure on Israel) ended the conflict. By 1978, Egypt had had enough, and it aligned itself with the US (vice the USSR) and signed the Camp David accords with Israel. Egypt and Israel both complied with the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians, who were welcome but not a party to it, refused to participate.

Resentment among the Palestinian people over their lack of control led to the First Intifada, a popular violent uprising, in 1987. More brutality, repression, and terrorism ensued. The conflict hit a turning point in 1993 when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords, laying out a path toward a negotiated two-state solution. But neither side was willing to negotiate on critical issues: Israel would not give up Jerusalem, the PLO would not accept the right of the Jewish nation to exist. Hard to compromise with those positions. A Second Intifada in 2000 yielded only more misery.

By 2006, the corruption and decadence of the PLO administration in the West Bank prompted those Palestinians (two million strong) in the Gaza strip to elect Hamas, a terrorist militia group, as its government. On a related note, there have been no further elections in Gaza. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state and the killing of all Jews in the Middle East. They seek only the compromise of the grave.

Why relate all this? Some people want to believe there is a misunderstanding between the Arabs and the Jews in the region, and if they could just compromise, all this bloodshed would end. But like Rome and Carthage, this will never end that way. Israel has tried time and again to find responsible partners for peace. When they have, they cooperated. Israel is at peace with Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco. The Palestinian Authority (the once-PLO government in the West Bank) has never been such a partner, and Hamas never will be (same goes for Hezbollah in Lebanon).

As I blogged a month ago, the Biden administration was semi-secretly working a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Israel would get peace with the prestigious keeper of Islam’s holiest sites and the primary Arab benefactor. The House of Saud would get an explicit American defense promise, support for eventual nuclearization in the event Iran creates an atomic bomb, and both Jerusalem and Riyadh could focus their antagonism on Iran. The US gets greater stability in the Middle East, isolates Iran, and freezes China out just as they try to move into the region. If all this sounds too good to be true, it certainly was to Iran and Hamas. They had to do something to scuttle the momentum toward this agreement.

What was this attack? It was a terrorist attack in the form of a cross border raid. It was not meant to occupy territory or to overrun Israel. It was meant to humiliate the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), kill as many unarmed Jews as quickly as possible, grab as many hostages as possible, and cause Israel to overreact in the hopes it scuttles the deal. If you think that sounds like a Pyrrhic victory (one where the result isn’t worth the cost), you would be correct. But the Arabs attacked in 1973 on the same premise: we’ll lose in the end, but we’ll make them look bad for a time.

Was this an intelligence failure? Too soon to tell, but here is what I can say. There are Israeli press reports from the past few weeks about suspicious activities in Gaza. The Egyptians claim they warned the Israelis. It is not hard to hide evidence of a raid, and it looks like the IDF looked at the indications and thought, “this attack would make no sense” so they thought it was a feint.

Whose fault is it? There are some trying to place blame on the Netanyahu government for causing division in Israel, but those voices are mostly being (rightly) drowned out. Those IDF reservists who refused to report last month in protest are all under arms and headed to war today, as they should be. Israel is amidst a divisive debate about what kind of country it wants to be, but that is not the reason Hamas attacked. Hamas attacked because it wants to kill Jews. Period.

What happens now? Israel has announced a total blockade of Gaza, a tiny slip of urban blight between Egypt, Israel, and the sea (excellent background from the Washington Post here). No food, no fuel, no water. Things will get ugly fast. In the meantime, the Israeli air and ground forces are systematically eliminating any Hamas infrastructure in the strip, with attendant civilian casualties. Ground attack will follow.

What should happen? True to form, Hamas is threatening to start streaming the execution of the hostages it has unless the IDF stops. The Israeli government can’t save those poor souls, some of whom are Americans. Israel should announce it is disarming and demilitarizing the Gaza strip. Demand that Hamas surrender all hostages immediately, or else all Hamas personnel will be tried for war crimes. All military age men in Gaza (16-65 years old) must lay down their weapons and surrender, to be repatriated to whatever nation will accept them. Their families are free to leave with them. Any women and children remaining are welcome to stay under UN auspices. If there is resistance, the IDF will first eliminate it, building by building, then turn the area back over to the UN. It will never be a city, an enclave, or a terrorist base again. It can become the world’s largest, peaceful refugee camp. Or it can become a ruin, a warning to those who always choose violence. Maybe it would even become a tourist attraction in a thousand years.

Gaza delenda est.

La Frontera: Money, Drugs, People, & Guns

Watching the Biden Administration re-enact a scene from the Marx Brothers Duck Soup movie the other day prompted me to pen this overly long post. My apologies. I hope to keep it informative and entertaining despite its length.

Why Duck Soup you ask? Because of the absurdity of the claims made. On a single day, DHS Secretary Mayorkas said he had to act to waive several federal environmental regulations which prohibited construction of additional border wall along the US-Mexican border. OK, why? Because under American appropriations law, the money had to be spent for that, as that it is what it was designated for back in 2019 under the Trump administration. And now the money would expire if it wasn’t spent. So far, so good. All this is true. Then he went on to explain that there is a migrant crisis at the border, which justifies waiving the environmental regulations. Over 100,000 parents traveling with children crossed the border last month, an all-time record. Ummmm, but, well, that new border wall is only a few tens of miles long, and it’s not popping up overnight, but hey, ok, we’re still good.

Except the Secretary could have just refused to waive the environmental regulations, and what would have happened? The money would not have been lost: it just would not have been spent. Money we didn’t have (remember, all this is deficit spending, as we have been running a deficit annually for decades now) would not have been spent. So there must be a real migrant crisis, and the wall must help, right?

Except President Biden repeated Mayorkas’ claims about “havng to build the wall,” then added ‘No, a wall does not work.’ Then Mayorkas had to backtrack and agree with the President, but continue to claim he “had to spend the money.” Which was false. Which means the administration realizes it is under political pressure from all sides about the border and immigration, and it would rather lie and look like it’s doing something, even if that something doesn’t do anything in the President’s opinion.

“Just wait till I get through with it”

Hence Duck Soup.

To figure all this out, you need to know politics, appropriations law, immigration trends, and some international economics/trade. Hence the administration thought they could get away with it. Even mainstream media uncritically reported the claim “the money had to be spent.” If there is appropriated money which expires, but it is prohibited by other federal law from being spent, it does not have to be spent. Period.

La frontera, the border in Español, is a fraught topic. Unlike the Canadian-American border, which is far longer and still practically unregulated, the Mexican-American border is freighted with much history. It’s still the most permeable international membrane in history, with good reason. What crosses it is what makes it so important, so difficult to address, and so likely to make fools of idealists, politicians, and demagogues. And what crosses it in order of importance are money, drugs, people, and guns.

MONEY

For two centuries, la frontera was much like any other border: a sleepy land of lines where laws changed and nothing much else. There were national rivalries, some crime, an occasional invasion or raid, and that’s it. America grew into a world power and Mexico remained in the immortal words of Porfirio Diaz “so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Mexico advanced economically, too, but remained deeply entrenched in what was then-called the Third World. Then NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, happened. NAFTA integrated the American, Canadian, and Mexican economies to an unprecedented degree.

H. Ross Perot was right about one thing: the giant sucking sound you heard was jobs moving to Mexico. What he got wrong was the notion that there are a finite number of jobs and when Mexico gained one, America lost one. The effect on Mexico was profound, and its economy grew immensely, now the 14th largest in the world. Yes, some American business sectors suffered mightily, and individual Americans lost jobs in those sectors, but that was inevitable. All NAFTA did was decide who the winners were: China, Korea, Vietnam or Mexico. NAFTA picked Mexico. And all that did was make Mexico into a stable economy, give it a middle-class, and reduce the flow of Mexican migration into America. Pretty good deal, no?

Another effect was to make Mexico and America inevitably into each other’s largest trading partners, with thousands of business sectors where parts of the final product or service are seamlessly produced and assembled without legal friction. Our economies are integrated, and like Siamese twins, they can’t be easily disentangled. China tried to do it, and almost did, but the political and economic fall-out of the pandemic made American officials realize that friend-shoring (i.e., trading with close, friendly countries you can rely on) is essential. You don’t want to find out that all your medical gear and drugs are made by the angry country that might have just caused the pandemic, do you?

One last thing about money at the border. Because of historic migration trends and the continuing need for migrant labor, there are many ethnic Mexicans living in the United States. How many? Thirty-seven million approximately, making them one of the largest ethnic contingents in the American melting pot. And since la familia is everything in Mexican culture, they send money home to la familia. Called remittances, Mexicans in America used digital wire services to send a record sixty billion US dollars home to Mexico last year, amounting to four percent of Mexico’s GDP.

In summary, more money transits la frontera than any border in world history. It is uniquely permeable, and both countries have spent a lot of time and effort to make business work effortlessly across it. No one can stop that for long, or change it significantly, without changing the basic structure of both nations’economies. And since it works so well, no one really wants to. The European Union has spent five decades trying to build something similar with mixed results. The United States and Mexico did it without really trying.

DRUGS

Believe it or not, the second most important thing crossing la frontera is drugs, and that is actually a subset of the money/trade aspect. Illegal narcotics are essentially just another product/service, wanted by some, provided by others. When something is legal or permitted in one place, but illegal or prohibited in another, clever people find a way to move it from one to the other to make money.

I am going to say something that will make my conservative American friends a little angry. The problem with drugs is not Mexico. It is America. Now for my liberal friends? The solution to drugs is not their decriminalization or legalization. The solution to drugs is ending American demand.

Mexico is only the focus of drug trafficking because of the fact of la frontera. Anybody who watched the original Netflix Narcos series knows the original cartels were Colombian, and the Mexicans were only middlemen who figured out how to muscle in on the business. Now the Mexican cartels are the biggest players, and that has caused untold death and mayhem in Mexico. Believe me when I say the vast majority of Mexicans would gladly accept the end of the reign of narcotraficantes, and in fact pray for it every day. No one is winning here.

Like any market, the drug trade has changed over time, responding to the changing consumer tastes in America. What started as mules (human and equine) carrying marijuana bales over mountain passes led to bricks of cocaine loaded in submarines and to packages of meta-amphetamine hidden in truck engines. Now the narcos have moved their dope-growing into America as individual states relax possession laws and the cartels focus on fentanyl. Why fentanyl? It’s an advanced, synthetic (nothing to grow), pain-reducing, euphoria-producing opioid, a miracle of modern medicine. Except it’s also highly addictive, cheap and easy to produce, and incredibly lethal in even tiny doses. A gram of fentanyl is fifty times more powerful than pure heroin, and there are versions one-hundred times more powerful than that. Added to other drugs, it increases the effects at zero-additional cost. Except those adding it along the supply chain don’t know who has added how much, so you get a record of over 100,000 America accidental overdose deaths in 2022.

Now you might think the cartels would NOT want to kill off their customers, but being the good businessmen they are, they realized long ago that American demand for drugs is what economists call “inelastic.” That is, no matter how much it costs in money, violence, death, or misery, there is unlimited continuing demand. So throw another fentanyl brick on the Bar-B! And how easy is it to produce? You need the raw materials, which are basically powders, and a pill or brick-making machine which is about the size of a home coffee pot. So when politicians start talking about taking out the fentanyl labs, stop listening, because they are speaking gibberish.

Why can’t America stop the drugs from entering? Too much legitimate trade crosses the border every day. We would have to stop the economy to stop the drugs. The drugs are too easy to hide, too easy to change transit methods (mules, slingshots, submarines, drones, trucks, tchotchkes, tourists, day-trippers, etc.), too easy to write off if they’re discovered, and it’s even too easy to bribe US Customs and Border Protection personnel. If Mexico disappeared tomorrow, we’d have the Canadian cartels to deal with the day after tomorrow. As the decriminalization and legalization experiment in the various states plays out, we will only change where and how America experiences its drug-induced misery and death. Until Americans stop craving drugs.

There is a final, cautionary note. Late in the 18th and early 19th century, The British Empire brought the Chinese Middle Kingdom to its knees, literally. It did so with the strength of the Royal Navy, the economic power of industrialization, and the subversive provision of opium, of which the Chinese simply couldn’t get enough. The leaders and the led in China gave up territory (e.g., Hong Kong, Macao), sovereignty , and their dignity, leading to what the Chinese called the Century of Humiliation. Current Chinese President Xi has called his efforts to lead China the fitting rejoinder to the lost hundred years. Is it any wonder the Chinese see the delicious irony in providing fentanyl precursors (and other drugs) to the cartels for sale to America?

PEOPLE

While desperate videos of asylum-seekers picking their way through razor-wire capture our current attention, the flow of people is only the third most important thing crossing the border. Why does the humanitarian aspect pale in comparison? Because of its size. No, really. That portion of it is so small!

Over three hundred million people, ninety million cars, and 4 million trucks cross la frontera every year. The border zone is incredibly integrated, even more so than the national economies. Mexicans shop at the big malls in Laredo, send their kids to private schools in El Paso, even drive to see the Buc-ee’s north of San Antonio. Americans cross to get dental crowns, prescription drugs, cosmetic surgery, even cheap daycare. Sometimes the crossing takes a long time, sometimes it’s fast, but it keeps happening every day. And the thing is, all these people go home every night. If they wanted to, they could stay, Americans in Mexico or Mexicans in America. But they don’t. They like their homes, their communities, their culture. They like visiting el otro lado (the other side), and that’s it. This is the daily fact of life along the border, and no politician or party or policy is going to change it.

Depending on the relative economic conditions in both countries, many young Mexican men (mostly) and women (some) head north for better paying jobs. Most do so temporarily, sending those remittances home, saving up money to move back home to Mexico and buy a casa or start a tienda, which earlier they could never hope to do in Mexico. Some stayed in America, like most ethnic arrivals there do. But consider this: is there any other ethnic migration to America that has had as many returnees as Mexico has? Like those living on la frontera, most Mexicans really like being Mexican, living in Mexico, eating Mexican comida and living la cultura de la famila mexicana. Believe me, they respect the United States, they wonder at the United States, they compete in futbol with the United States, and man do they like potato chips and Coca Cola! If all of Mexico really wanted to be in America, they could get here in about a week. Just sayin’.

What about some of the most common fake news themes regarding migrants?

  • Taking American jobs? At times, America had worker visas for Mexican migrants to work in the harvest period for various crops, jobs which even 1960s-era American teenagers and twenty-somethings wouldn’t take. It helped to regulate the movement of migrants, and there is still a need for such workers today, even though few Mexicans need those jobs now (it’s mostly other Latinos, now).
  • Are migrants a means of drug-trafficking? They were once upon a time, much like bootleg stills were a thing during 1920s Prohibition. But the drug trade is a major multinational business now, and handing fentanyl bricks to desperate, illiterate peasants is not an effective distribution system. So yes, you may find some enterprising coyote ad-libbing with some drugs and migrants on the side, but this is not the drug problem, any more than your batch of home-brew beer is the alcohol problem. A bigger issue is that the narcos realized that due to America’s dysfunctional immigration system, the cartels could use their old cross-border routes to smuggle illegal migrants. Here’s the real genius: the cartels only need to get the migrants across the border–it doesn’t matter if the migrants get caught! The Americans either let the migrants stay, or they return them to Mexico. Either way, the cartels get paid once, or twice, with no downside.
  • Are most migrants criminals? Well, by definition, almost all are since they violate some law in crossing the border, a technicality but one worth remembering. You’ll find no group more irritated by illegal immigration than legal immigrants for that very reason, even when talking about their own ethnic relations! But such immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes in America, when considering their economic status. Poor people get desperate. Given that being convicted of a crime is a sure-fire way to get deported, most illegal immigrants are fearful of the American justice system (they also have no experience in a “just” justice system) and are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

What is absolutely true about the number of people migrating into the United States is this: the absolute number America can accept is huge, almost immeasurable. The absolute number your community can accept is small, almost unnoticeable. America is so vast, with so many towns and cities and space, it could easily absorb huge numbers of migrants. But of course, not all at once. Homes and businesses and schools don’t spring up overnight. You can’t integrate people into a country when you can’t even speak their language, let alone know anything about their culture. Mexicans and Americans have been practicing this dance for centuries, and we’re pretty good at it. But now we’re dealing with Venezuelans, Nigerians, Afghans, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Haitians, et cetera. There is unlimited demand for migration to the United States, because all those peoples realize something many Americans have forgotten: maybe it’s not a bad place after all. There has to be limits, rules, and a line. It is only fair to those who are here, those who already came her, and those who want to come here.

If America can accept many more migrants, it can only do so willingly in the mind of the polis, the public. Migrants are statistics, people happen in real places. When it happens to you, it becomes real. See how quickly those sanctuary cities lost their lofty ideals when the migrants actually took them up on the offer of sanctuary? It is not racist or nationalist to want your neighborhood to be the way it was when you moved there; it’s human.

The sensitivity among some Americans to immigration always appears shortly after an especially large influx. America has five percent of the world’s population and twenty percent of its migrants. Our current forty-five million migrants are more than the next four countries combined. That total represents almost fourteen percent of America’s population, just short of the all-time record of fifteen percent set back in 1890. That’s the period of the Know-Nothings, the anti-Catholic Blaine laws, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the “Irish need not apply” signs.

People can accept change, but not too much, and not too fast. I live in an area which is sometimes called Gringolandia by locals, as so many American and Canadian expats live here the culture is different than the rest of Mexico. Can it cause some resentment? Yes. Does it create new opportunities? Yes. Is it manageable, if it happens slowly as opposed to in a rush? Yes. If you go into the southside of Chicago (be careful when you do!), you can probably find a ethnic Nigerian-community Catholic Church, with huge murals left of La Guadalupana (from the previous Mexicano worshipers) on the walls in the once-Polish neighborhood parish of St. Stanislaus. Change happens. America is actually good at it. And we need more Americans, wherever they come from!

GUNS

Weapons are the least important thing crossing the border, but they merit consideration, as some (especially in Mexico) contend they are an issue. Let’s see why. In case you haven’t heard, Mexico has a drug-cartel-violence-murder problem. How big a problem? Almost 43,000 homicides last year, putting them in the category of places like South Africa or Syria. Thousands of people go missing, usually the result of cartel attempts at intimidation, recruiting, or vengeance. The cultura of the extended Mexican family means most everybody has a relative involved in the drug trade. Which puts most everybody at some risk. This is also why targeting the cartels hasn’t worked so well for either the American or Mexican governments: you inevitably kill someone’s cousin, which means six new primos are aggrieved.

So are guns fueling the violence in Mexico? Well, if the cartels only had machetes, things might slow down a little, of course. The issue is what type of guns, from where? Mexico’s constitution contains the right to bear arms, just like that in the United States. However, legal weapons here are strictly regulated by type and number and use, and there is only one store, run by the Mexican Army, which retails weapons. Yet guns are everywhere, and so are gun homicides. The fact is, back in the 1970s, the Soviets flooded Central America with hundreds of thousands of cheap, reliable AK47s and other semi-automatic weapons, hoping to spark revolutions and keep the Gringos busy in their backyard. The AK47 is like a diamond: it is forever. Dig it up from a cache, oil it, clean it, and it fires like the day it was made. The AK47 is user- (but not target-) friendly, simple, effective, and plentiful. It is the narcos weapon of choice.

Do cartels import weapons from the United States. Yes. As they have diversified and made more money, cartels have illegally imported more exotic or expensive weapons from America. Some of those weapons are so powerful they over-match the Mexican military, and that’s a real-if-limited problem. Here’s the rub: if the Americans could magically shut down the flow of guns into Mexico tomorrow, the cartels could keep on shooting for decades. Why do some Mexican officials make such a big deal about American guns in Mexico? It is a convenient rejoinder: if the all-powerful American government can’t control guns from its side of the border, how can you expect Mexico to control drugs on its side of the border?

And there’s a statistics problem, too. To respond to the Mexican government’s concerns, the United States funds efforts to track weapons from the United States confiscated during crimes in Mexico. The funding keeps stats on how many are found, but only of those which are likely to be from the USA. Guess what? That’s a numerator without a denominator! So the stats show the number of such guns in Mexico increasing, but not what the relative percentage is. Maybe the number of American guns used in violent crimes in Mexico increased 100% last year. But if the number of American guns in Mexico is only 1% of the total number of guns used in crimes in Mexico, it is irrelevant. NO one knows, although any cartel photo shoot tells a story.

Simple solutions like “build the wall” or “sanctuary cities” are nonsense, and anyone who spouts them should be ignored. The social and economic integration America and Mexico has is an amazing boon for both, and should be fostered, never threatened. There are mutual solutions to the challenges posed by la frontera, but they require both parties in America, and both national governments, to avoid posturing and to give up slogans.

A College Football Requiem

Astute friends will note we’re several weeks into the college football season and I have yet to write my annual paean to my favorite obsession. Never fear, it’s here. But this year is different.

This year, my favorite team (Notre Dame), has Marcus Freeman returning as head coach. Last year was a roller-coaster ride of emotions ending well with a bowl game victory and a 9-4 record. That record included a pantsing (it’s a sports term, look it up) of Clemson and a comeback victory over South Carolina. Something bad happened at Southern Cal (often does), something inexplicable happened against Marshall, and something insufferable happened against Stanford. As I said, a mixed bag.

But the coach seems to be an upright dude, is growing into the role (4-0 this year as I write this), and says all the right things. He is a credit to the university, which is refreshing after he replaced the insufferable prick who preceded him. I railed on about the former coach for ten years, only to have him prove all my charges against his character with his later behavior. I’m sorry to the LSU Tigers and their fans, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But why the sad title, if things are going so well for my team? The sport that is college football is dying before our eyes, and it–as we know it–will be gone in under five years. Money killed it, as is so often the case. To use a Clue metaphor, it was ESPN on the Gridiron with a roll of Benjamins.

Most people don’t know this, but once upon a time, there was no NFL. Oh, there was a professional football league, but it had all the glamour and cachet of women’s field hockey. Back in the 1920’s & 1930’s, American baseball reigned supreme, with boxing (!) and college football vying for number two. College football won out, and continued to gain in popularity. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world: universities, centers of education, field teams of student-athletes (properly pronounced ATH-UH-LEATS). Why? Back in those days, colleges were overwhelmingly- or all-male, and sports provided an outlet for all that testosterone. Obscure traditions developed, rivalries over imagined slights or for ridiculous trophies were born. It was local, silly, but intensely passionate.

Something about the “ideal” of an amateur going all out for his school on Saturday was seen by the masses as good and wholesome, while the men who played professionally on Sunday were seen as failures who didn’t have real jobs. In fact most did, as they made practically nothing from football. This dichotomy, that amateurism was good and professionalism bad, was key to the sport’s success. It used to be the same with the Olympics, too, once-upon-a-time.

I put those quotation marks around “ideal” because some cynic out there (I’m looking at you!) will point out the many exceptions: college players who got paid with “golden handshakes” after the game, boosters who gave mom & dad jobs if sonny went to Enormous State U, and the like. And there were cheating scandals, gambling scandals, gut-courses, and plenty of young male bad behavior, up to and including the criminal. But there were also thousands of players playing the game, so the vast majority never got paid, never acted the boor, usually attended class, and sometimes even graduated. The deal was free tuition, which amounted to something, even for an ATH-UH-LEAT.

But its popularity continued to grow, and with television, so did revenue. The NCAA, the governing body comprising all the schools, used to limit how often a team could play on television: in those more genteel days, it was considered to be an unfair advantage. But the rise of ESPN created an insatiable demand: every team is on TV every week, and the money rains down.

Being forward-thinking, the NCAA instituted a unique form of revenue sharing, putting money in accounts for players who could retrieve it upon graduation. It allowed schools to cover things like special diets, health insurance, and even pay the players a stipend since they spent so much time preparing for games that they couldn’t work jobs like other students. No, wait, that’s not what happened at all. The NCAA member schools kept all the money for themselves, and went on a spending spree that would have embarrassed Scrooge McDuck.

Behind the scenes at NCAA headquarters

Schools spent money on stadiums, coaches, luxury boxes, football dorms, coaches, football-only recreation centers, special training facilities, coaches, boondoggle trips, football administrative staffs, recruiting, and even coaches. Many schools spent more than they made, because winning football can be very expensive. But the orgy of spending went on. Players got some benefits, like those special dorm rooms and rec centers. But they got little or no direct money. Even when they wanted to market themselves, separate from the football team, they couldn’t do it. Regular students could make money using talents they had, but football players? Oh, no, they mustn’t. Coaches moved around, sometimes failing up. My favorite team hit a bad patch and “bought out” two coaches in a row, telling them to move along but agreeing to continue paying their contract salary as long as they went away. Three coaches on the payroll at once? Priceless.

Eventually the amounts of money got so large, and the imbalance so obvious, players began to take legal action. Cases have gone all the way to the Supreme Court, and it looks like the NCAA is a dead man walking in its ability to manage the sport. Nothing to mourn there, except for the problem that soon there will be no rules at all. Under the current interim situation, boosters can pay ATH-UH-LEATS using a fig-leaf called a Name, Image & Likeness (NIL for short) contract. There are verifiable cases of high school recruits offered millions of dollars in NIL money to attend Big Tech State. Rules on whether players could transfer–which deterred them from doing so–have been loosened. Now there is a “transfer portal” which includes over 8,000 players!

Explains so much

And of course with the imminent demise of the NCAA, the rules on whether the players need to actually be students have practically disappeared.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the conferences and rivalries which were the heart of amateur athletics are also up for sale. You could cheer through losses all year for your pathetic alma mater, as long as you beat your in-state rival. Now, those rivalries are disappearing, as teams flee one conference for another with a bigger TV rights pay out. How crazy is it?

The Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives formed in the late 19th Century and its athletic league was called the Western Conference, as it represented the western edge of football civilization. It comprised mainly large State universities, with the exception of little private Northwestern and Chicago, which left when it became apparent sports (not academics) were king. You know it as the Big Ten. Or the B1G, where the G might be a 6, since it has grown to sixteen members and stretched all the way to the State University of New Jersey (SUNJ, which some call Rutgers). Oh, wait, it’s eighteen teams, and it goes coast-to-coast. Sure, the women’s volleyball team at Southern Cal will enjoy those red-eye flights to Piscataway. I call them the BIG-N, or The Integer for short, as it is less specific.

So you’re thinking, “Pat, stop yelling at the kids to get off your lawn and just sit back and enjoy the fifty or so games every weekend.” Well I will, only because the game still resembles its former self. But change is only beginning. The B1G and the $EC (the South East Conference, not to be confused with the smaller financial organization known as the Securities and Exchange Commission) will soon choose a third partner to negotiate with to replace the NCAA. That third partner will likely be some hybrid clone of one of the other conferences (the ACC, the BIG 12, the American, but of course not the PAC-12, which has only two members), which continue to change shape like John Carpenter’s version of The Thing:

Look!, Its the Big Atlantic American Conference!

What could go wrong? To get a glimpse of the future, join me on a quick trip to Boulder, Colorado, home of the University of Colorado Buffaloes. First off, let me note that Colorado has the best mascot in all college football, and the sight of that beast dragging its handlers around the field before a game is must-see TV. It’s a once very good football program which has fallen on very hard times (how hard, you ask? 1-11 last year). It left its historic perch in the Big-12 to chase TV revenue in the PAC-12, but like Rick in Casablanca, it was misinformed: no one cares enough about college football on the West Coast.

PAC-12 Championship? I thought this was a wine & brie tasting!

To resurrect the program as it returns to the Big-12 for more money (no really), Colorado hired away Deion Sanders, head coach of Jackson State University in Florida. You may know him as “Coach Prime” or before that, “Prime Time” as an NFL All-Pro with the Cowboys et al, while also playing Major League Baseball for the Atlanta Braves, or even “Neon Deion” as a star player with the Florida State Seminoles. He is at least the best athlete of his generation, the only man to have both Super Bowl and World Series rings. Beyond all that, he has proven to be a master motivator, an above-average coach, and a genius at self-promotion, perhaps only behind Steve Jobs in the modern era.

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be the bad-news part? Sanders is succeeding beyond anyone’s expectations thus far, and his success will bring imitation. Yes, he’s great at recruiting ATH-UH-LEATS. Young men want to play for him, and he motivates them to play their best. His teams win, although not so much that anyone is calling him one of the best (maybe later this year, as most hype-meters have to go to 11 to even measure him). So what’s his secret? He treats the game as a professional would. He encourages wholesale transfers: He sent seventy-one players into the portal when he arrived, and picked up thirty-five. He appears to be genuinely concerned for his players as players, but as students, well, they come to win at football. He scoffs at the hypocrisy of the NCAA, which merits his disdain. But his approach, as entertaining as it is, is a hundred yard dash to the semi-professional model.

As others adopt it, the ATH-UH-LEATS will become employees. Can’t fire an employee for performance unrelated to their job, so how are you going to make them go to class? And if football players aren’t student-athletes anymore, then they don’t create a Title IX compliance nightmare either: eliminate eighty-five male football scholarships and SHAZAM, every university is suddenly fully compliant evermore. Of course, when you eliminate college football revenue, which will go off university books, most all non-revenue sports will suffer. The resulting semi-pro “college football” league will house about fifty or so programs, shedding those (regardless of whatever conference they were originally in) who don’t bring in revenue. We’ll have free agency starting senior year of high school (that will go well with programs like Miami of Florida, where “hookers and blow” was a locker room tradition).

I await the day Coach Prime’s team is behind at half time and simply has the opposing team’s quarterback switch sides during the game for an NIL envelope full of cash at midfield. Can’t happen, you say?

“Show Me the Money!”

So while we wait for the inevitable, I’ll enjoy what little college football is left. Kind of like RJ MacReady at the end of The Thing:

See what happens