Somewhere in the Sea of Cortez, on the dive platform of the Don Jose liveaboard dive boat. Knowledgeable scuba divers will notice what's wrong with this picture.

Immigration Reform Impossible Without US ID Card

Most liberals and conservatives hate the idea of the federal government issuing a US ID card. Fine. I hate it too. But absent that, there's simply no way to control who's in our country--whether it be nice people just seeking work, or terrorists seeking our destruction, or criminals seeking profit at our expense.

An ID card with biometric data would enable us to keep illegals from working at large businesses and enable everyone from hospital clerks to beat cops to verify someone's status easily. A wall across the Mexican border is great, but at the very least it won't affect the 10-15 million illegals already here. They can be given a one year deadline to leave the country legally, and after that be subject to permanent expulsion, with returning made a felony.

Otherwise just be honest and say you value your personal privacy above our integrity as a nation, above the cultural shifts such a huge influx guarantees, above the mockery we've made of our legal immigration system, above the mistreatment of our domestic unskilled workers by forcing them to compete with illegals who have no rights, above the possibility of terrorists pulling off another 9/11.

I have no doubt that some people in government would want to misuse a national ID database. But that's what a democracy with elected officials is for.

Our Society Needs Conservatives, Liberals AND Moderates

Society absolutely needs conservatives, liberals AND moderates. Don't imagine that if all those jerks on the other side just disappered we'd have a great country.

I can illustrate this truth on a small scale: Imagine you lived in a small hunting and gathering band--the way everyone lived until just a few thousand years ago. At any given moment, your little tribe's liberals would be itching to go over the next hill and see what's there. Conservatives would want to go back to the last place you were in. And moderates would waffle--but be open to either option--and ultimately would cast the deciding vote after the liberals and conservatives finished yelling at each other.

Sometimes if your tribe goves over the hill it gets annihilated by another, bigger, meaner tribe that lives there that you didn't know about. Sometimes if you go back you discover things have changed there and your once-comfortable existence turns into a hardscrabble life. Sometimes if you take too long to make up your mind all your options disappear. No one outlook is always right, unless you love your outlook so passionately you'd prefer mass suicide to changing that outlook. That's the path Jim Jones took in Guyana.

The liberal impulse is exploring, open to new things. The conservative impulse honors tradition and the things that have been proven to work. The moderate impuls is to think about pragmatic outcomes and profitable compromises. Liberals and conservatives think moderates are less principled, but that's only true if you think trying to reach compromise is somehow unprincipled. I think all three paths are principled.

A healthy society proceeds using a three-way dialogue. It fails when one outlook gains total dominance. Power corrupts, and keeping the three outlooks in the mix provides the most fundamental set of checks and balances a society can have.

It's easy to nod your head sagely as you read this and say Sure, okay. It's less easy in the throes of a political campaign when the other side has smeared yours in some despicable way. And the feelings of righteous rage and delectable reverge are far more powerful than the joys of sweet reason. But it's in the clinches that I most want you to remember what I've said here.

--Ehkzu

"To win you must have cold head and warm heart."
--Italian ice dancer at the Turin Olympics

Putri Pupua liveaboard dive boat

We spent 12 days aboard the Putri Pupua last fall, sailing to the Wakatobi Islands from Maumere in Flores, Indonesia. It's a nice dive boat, Indonesian owned & operated, and the trip was great. The seas were mostly calm, the diving amazing (day and night), the boat sturdy, the cabin comfortable. Not luxurious...but comfortable.
Diving is the closest most of us will ever get to being astronauts--only we actually get to go to alien worlds. And best of those alien worlds are in the Philippines/Indonesia/New Guinea triangle, with the greatest diversity of wildlife of any habitat on Earth. That's why we travel halfway around the world to go there. And we've found a dive operator--Grand Komodo--who we trust, which is important when you're as far off the beaten track as we were. Highly recommended. About 80% of the dive sites were snorkel-able BTW. Bring a camera and a laptop or a portable hard drive image bank (we use the Transcend Digital Album 20GB) or you'll kick yourself later.

Ribbon Eel, Banda Sea, Indonesia (Nov. 5, 2005; Olympus 5050/PT015 UW housing)

Liberal ideologues deny race--just as conservative ideologues deny evolution.

I sent this note the Washington Post ombudsmen. It was never replied to or acted on.

To: ombudsman@washpost.com

Subject: Bad Science Stated as Fact by the Washington Post

Regarding "Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin"
By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, December 16, 2005; A01):

In this article Weiss said "Recent revelations that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical has proved that race...is a phony construct." This canard is as popular among liberals as so-called "Intelligent Design" is among conservatives. Both are, however, equally fatuous--and equally driven by ideology.

Race is determined by constellations of traits, not particular genes. Most widespread species of plants and animals develop into distinct races as part of the process of evolution that eventually produces separate species.

For example, dogs and wolves are different races. They can interbreed freely for the most part, and though no one gene sets them apart, only a fool would call them indistinguishable. Likewise doctors who ignore race ill-serve their patients. Everything from Tay-Sachs syndrome to sickle-cell anemia are strongly racially linked, as are subtler traits, such as the fact that many Eskimos' livers metabolizing one tuberculosis drug so quickly as to render it ineffective. Ignorance of this led to a TB epidemic in Canada in the 1950s.

Even the 99.9 percent argument shows profound ignorance of the effect of relatively small numbers of genes on differentiation. Chimpanzees are 98 percent genetically identical to humans. Even mice appear to share over 39,000 of our 40,000 genes. Would you call their differences from us just skin--or fur--deep?

For further reading, try "Medicine's Race Problem" from the Hoover Institute (http://www.policyreview.org/DEC01/satel.html). I realize the Hoover Institute is a largely conservative think tank, but the assertions in this article are all confirmable independently.

As a moderate Democrat I'm dismayed by the Republican Party's broadband assault on science, seeking to subvert it to political expediency as thoroughly as the Soviets did. But it may dismay me even more to see one of my favorite newspapers fall prey to equally ideological considerations on the other side. Outcome-driven investigation is always bad, no matter how noble the goal. It's particularly galling that your writer presented something so controversial--the assertion that race doesn't exist--as settled fact.

This particular scientifc faux pas represents the ongoing historical backlash against White Southern racism in America and Nazi racism in Europe. But how can we oppose Republican tampering with scientific objectivity when we do it ourselves?

I hope for more than a correction or a piece of editorial asperity from your desk. Ideally the Washington Post should do a series of articles showing how both the left and the right seek to corrupt science on behalf of their goals and ideology. It's obvious to liberals what convervatives are pulling, and to some extent vice versa. But such a series would draw the wrath of both sides, and I believe you've stated that that's a good omen.

I sent a letter to the editor on December 16 regarding the Washington Post article, on the day it came out. I'm sending this message to you now since that approach evidently failed.

"Journalism is the one source those who want to manipulate the public are most prone to denounce."--the Project for Excellence in Journalism