1: Any promises by pompous politicians to "get tough on crime"; we already pay around $500 per household to keep people behind bars. Let's try getting smart instead of getting tough for a change. 2: Related topic. Hysterical reports about ex-convicts committing nasty crimes. Yep, it happens. People who have no criminal records do nasty things also. I'd love to hear some reports about how many ex-cons are busy doing their jobs, paying their bills, and raising their children. 3: Any more poppycock claims that President Obama isn't an American citizen or that 90% of the people in prison are illegal aliens or climate change is a socialist hoax. 4: Detailed reports of the naughty bedroom frolics of politicians and preachers, followed by tearful proclamations of remorse. Persons of either gender who provide this fodder for unimaginative paparazzi should learn to say "none of your damned business!" or else keep their knees together or zippers up, as the case may be. The voyeurs among us can pay for their fix at the porn shop rather than relying on Fox News. Continue...

Not long ago on this site I told you that Christmas isn't the exclusive property of any religion, in spite of the name, and explained why. Even a sarcastic friend of mine who delusionally believes he's smarter than I am (don't worry, Steve Langer, Ph.D., I'm not going to mention your name) told me it was well researched and well written. But please understand that I still wish all truly devout Christians a joyous and holy experience of this special day. If Christmas is only a secular winter holiday to you, may it be a happy one, and a time to wish for more warmth in your own heart, in your family, in our national life, and in the role of our nation in the world. Continue...

Here I was, walking across beautiful downtown Chicago in a charming drizzle, with gentle 30 mph breezes, the temperature a balmy 43 degree fahrenheit. (I love Chicago, even when it's being a beast, just like my wife.) Just to make everything perfect, I was dangerously hungry. No, I'm not diabetic or hypoglycemic; I mean dangerous to pigeons and small children and anything else edible that came within grabbing distance. Too hungry for whatever I could have grabbed at a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, and too busy to squeeze into a serious sitdown restaurant. Suddenly I realized one of the ways New York City has it all over Chicago: In midtown Manhattan at least, there is a Korean deli on every block. I think it's a city ordinance. There must be sidewalks and streetlights and Korean delis.

In my visits there, I've relied on the abundance of Korean delis to protect me from starvation and charges of cannibalism. Maybe others have had different experiences, but I always found a healthy variety of ready-to-eat foods, without having to wait a long time, and courteous service, and usually some modest sit-and-eat accomodation. Major convenience. And I never needed a stomach pump or antibiotics as a result of eating at one of these establishments.

Later, when I'd had a meal and my usual self-indulgent beverage, my thoughts drifted from Korean delis to Koreans in general, of whom I've never met any I disliked, to Asians in general, and immigrants in general. From there I thought that we tend to underestimate enormously what immigrants do for us, and we tend to overestimate enormously the problems they cause.

In my opinion, one of the faults of our culture is that we tend to like simple solutions, to deny that there's any such thing as a complex problem. Our patriotism also tends to be overly simplistic. In fact, in many Americans, it's jingoist and belligerent. Some think that the measure of how good an American you are is dependent on how well you speak English. Excuse me for bragging, but I know more about English grammar than the vast majority of those people, and some of those who get their noses most out of joint about the horrors of multilingualism don't know a nominative from an accusative and couldn't conjugate most verbs properly if their lives depended on it.

This isn't a profound statement, and virtually everyone has heard it: At any time, immigrants of the most recent wave have been a favored object of discrimination. I have thoughts about why blacks, regardless of how long their ancestors have been here, are perenially lumped treated as such a group, but that's a subject for a separate article.

So historically, many native-born Americans have tended to blame the "micks" and "chinks" and "krauts" and "spicks," but that's mostly our less cultured brethren. The more polite tend to say things like "the reason there's less alcoholism and crime in ______ is because it's a more homogeneous society." Which essentially means the same thing.

Ironically, we sort of know that this is wrong, so we make it politically incorrect to make any reference to ethnicity. In so doing, I think we miss the opportunity -- the obligation -- to recognize what immigrants do for us. Even those illegal immigrants from Latin America.

There. I said it. At some time in the near future I'll go into that further, but if I've annoyed you enough with that blasphemy, or by claiming that we Americans are not absolutely perfect, don't let it eat on you. Hit the comment button and tell me what you think. That's what I've just done.

Meanwhile, to any Koreans who happen to be reading this, please consider coming to America, settling in Chicago, and opening a deli in the Loop. If you have trouble getting a permit, talk to Mayor Daley and tell him you've always wanted to live where there were so many Irish-Americans.

As a hard-core Roller Derby fan, who also happens to like Drew Barrymore, I was delighted to know that she was directing her first movie and that it was going to be about the fastest sport on eight small wheels. It's frankly puzzling to me why modern Roller Derby is unknown to so many Americans, and doesn't get regular coverage in print or broadcast sports news. Maybe the movie would get more people into those venues ranging from 25,000-seat stadiums to small skating rinks, where hundreds of teams battle it out for local championships, and all-star teams from cities as diverse as Grand Rapids, MI and New York City compete for regional and national championships. I hope it does. But it will send some there with wrong impressions.

Admitted, it's a funny, exciting movie, with good acting, and in my opinion, it shows that Drew Barrymore has paid her dues and done her homework. It does capture some of the Roller Derby culture, and the kind of personal epiphany that becoming a "rollergirl" (some of them start in their 40s or 50s) represents. This guy tells that side of it very well http://news.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=35&a=420294 so I won't go into detail here.

On the plus side, the movie shows that Roller Derby is a sport, with real strategies, not just a race, and that it has lot of enthusiastic followers, that in its modern rebirth it's played mostly by women, that you can get close and know the players as human beings, and that it's LOTS of fun.

Now, here's what I think needs to be added. Most Roller Derby now is skated on flat tracks, not banked tracks. The most serious action is in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, WFTDA. Just try Googling it and see how many thousands of sites come up. Rollergirls are more likely to be professional or business women than servers in fast food restaurants. I've met Roller Derby skaters who were lawyers, artists, psychologists, and physicians, but I can assure you that they would treat a derbygirl who happens to work in a fast food joint like a sister.

It's a rough sport, and injuries can occur, including, unfortunately, very serious ones occasionally, but rollergirls aren't allowed to trip, punch, or wrestle each other on the track. A lot of what you see happening as a routine part of play in Whip It would be stopped immediately with the perpetrators being sent to the penalty box or even thrown out of the game. Also, I can't imagine a league taking in a 17-year-old without knowing her true age and getting written permission from her parents. Oh, yeah, the rollergirls I've known don't depend on a male coach to do their thinking for them.

So here's my recommendation: Go see Whip It, then go see Roller Derby. Take in a couple of matches and learn a little bit about the rules and strategies of the game. (After all, if you knew nothing about baseball or football, the first game you see would make no sense to you at all.) Try to meet some of the skaters. Then if you want to see some of the best Roller Derby in the world, get yourself to Chicago and watch the Windy City Rollers in action. (OK, maybe I'm a LITTLE biased.)

When I accused my nation collectively of qualifying for the admittedly unscientific definition of a sex addict, I promised that my next eruption of thought would explain why. Then, the Chicago Olympics fiasco came up, etc. (It's not you, honey, I was just too distracted to be interested in sex.) If you didn't read America is a sex addict, you can scroll down to it now. In my description of a hypothetical male sex addict, perhaps you already have an idea of why I level this accusation at the collective American psyche. That hypothetical person spends an inordinate amount of energy obsessing about sex, or looking for sexual titillation, or sexualizing every subject, or repressing his own sexual needs, or acting out in sexually inappopriate ways, or supressing other people's sexual freedom, or...need I go on?

Serially, or simultaneously, in any combination. Now, just consider some of the following.

We've had millions of dollars allocated for "abstinence only" sex education because there are parents and politcal powers who don't want children to even know about sex. During the impeachment of President Clinton, the words "oral sex" actually got into the news, and some parents protested "how am I supposed to explain that to my children?" I thought at the time if you can't tell your child about oral sex, you have a bigger problem than how Monica got white spots on her blue dress. In a Chicago suburb there was an interesting sculpture of three human figures, so abstract that they only vaguely resembled people, with a kind of scribble where one would expect pubic hair. It was on a major thoroughfare, and nicely broke up the monotony of suburban office parks ad nauseum. Then suddenly it had been moved into a grove of trees, barely visible from the road. I never asked, but I'm sure what happened was the same thing that happened to Michaelangelo's sculpture of David: Somone was shocked that he had genitalia. When a female performance artist's breast was exposed for a fraction of a second at a Superbowl halftime, the uproar that resulted was deafening, and even though the woman's nipple and aureola were concealed, the network was fined $550,000 for "indecency."

It can be argued that our government nearly stopped functioning during the inquisition into whether or not Monica Lewinsky had actually performed oral sex on President Clinton in the Oval Office. Through some bizarre reasoning this was supposedly related to whether or not he may have, years earlier, exposed his genitals to one Paula Jones, an employee of the State of Arkansas when he was governor. How one divides the cost of this investigation between Clinton's "b.j." and the Whitewater bubble is open to debate, but there is no doubt it was many millions of dollars. By contrast, less than a half million was spent on investigating whether the tragedy of 9-11 could have been prevented. (This is without assigning a dollar value to having the national security adviser commit contempt of Congress.)

One of those who cast the most and biggest stones at Clinton is now a governor. His political career is over because he's a married guy with a girlfriend. Apparently he spent some state monies to finance his foreign trips to see her, but the tidal wave of indignation was over his marital infidelity. A former presidential hopeful, John Edwards, is now a dark horse at best after his extra-marital affair was disclosed.

So we are shocked and indignant at the dalliances of our elected officials, and at the same time amused and titillated. We're afraid of sex and obsessed with it at the same time. The most popular issue of Sports Illustrated is the famous Swimsuit Issue, with so-called swimsuits that are about as concealing as two Band-Aids and a cork. Any major city has page after page of "escort" ads in its yellow pages, even though the "full service" for which the so-called escorts and their agencies receive the bulk of their income is illegal; ask Elliot Spitzer.

We may be horrified at stories of young women in third world countries being stoned to death for having consensual sex, but some American parents resist having their daughters vaccinated for human pappiloma virus; their refusal is like saying to the daughter "if you should have sex with a man who carries HPV, even if he's your husband, I want you to die for it." No matter that the girl's father may be purchasing pornography featuring "barely legal" females.

We devote valuable police efforts to arresting prostitutes and their customers, often with sensational televised street stings, while the aforementioned escort services operate more or less openly. In many cities, totally nude dancing is permitted in "gentlemen's clubs" that may not sell alcoholic beverages. Similar clubs sell alcohol, but women dancers are required to wear g-strings, which (barely) cover the pubis plus pasties over the nipples. Often the pasties are actually "cheaters," made to look identical to nipples. Male patrons stimulating themselves through their clothing may be arrested, and the club may be punished as well. In a club that sells alcohol, in most cases a glimpse of labia puts the liquor license at risk.

It's not uncommon for someone to be arrested for nude sunbathing in a fenced area on their own property that is almost impossible to view from an adjacent property. A woman exposing her breasts on a balcony, even at a free-for-all celebration like Mardis Gras, is subject to arrest. Changing clothes on a public beach can land you in jail. Yet we love music videos that would be less sexually provocative if the performers were nude, and dance contests that are borderline striptease acts.

Homophobia is everywhere in America, and men are subject to being murdered for the crime of having been born gay. Self-proclaimed prophet Jimmy Swaggart, the same one who bawled like a baby on nationwide television after it became public knowledge that he humped hookers even more often than he waved Bibles, announced that he would kill any man who ever looked at him "that way" and happily answer to God for it. Another famous homophobe, one Ted Haggard, was forced to make a public confession that he had indulged his urges to have sex with men. Senator Larry Craig, who had resisted gay rights laws and admission of homosexuals into the military, was arrested for soliciting other men for sex in an airport restroom and entered a guilty plea, which he later tried to rescind when the matter became public knowledge. That's when other men came forward to report that the good senator had volunteered to polish their own knobs in public restrooms.

Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down all state sodomy laws in 2003, engaging in anal intercourse even with your spouse could earn you a prison sentence in many states, and in some, even oral intercourse was a crime. In Michigan, a first offense for sodomy, with the same or opposite sex, could be punished by 15 years in prison, and a second offense by a life sentence. To the best of my knowledge, the first state to repeal its sodomy laws was Illinois, in 1962. Florida's law stayed on the books until 2003, but the sentence was $1000 fine and 60 days in jail, compared to Michigan's 15 years! And it's supposed to be the same nation, right?

Our age of consent laws are a complete hodge podge. What is not even a misdemeanor in one state can earn you a long prison sentence in another. The minimum age at which a minor may legally consent to sexual intercourse ranges from 14 to 18. In most states, it's illegal to show pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18, so in a state like Michigan, for example, where the age of consent is 16, you could legally have sex with a consenting 16-year-old but go to prison for showing him or her a copy of Hustler. It's strange enough that you could be labeled a sex offender for the rest of your life for having sex with a consenting post-pubertal teenager, but downright bizarre that the same thing could happen for letting a 17-year-old see an "adult" video.

Along with nude dancing, pornography is now legal in most places, but stores that specialize in sexually oriented videos and magazines plus "sex toys" generally have darkened windows and are prohibited from being located near schools and churches, and most frequently are confined to marginal retail areas. In some cases, an established sex store has had to move after a school or church opens in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, cable television is flooded with ads for products promising to cure erectile dysfunction, and others promising to increase the size of the penis, or that "certain part of the male body" as one spokeswoman seductively describes it to the camera. Dozens of TV spots throughout the day for exercise regimens and machines emphasize appearance over all else. The most important thing in life for a woman is to have firm breasts, a tight abdomen, shapely buttocks, beautiful legs, and in general to look like one of those "barely legal" porn stars. For a man it's the same tight abs, plus bulging pecs and biceps, and plenty of youthful hair.

Of course most of us won't look like the ideal sex object no matter what we do. Small wonder so many just give up and eat themselves into type II diabetes, making us the most obese nation on earth. After all, you could always have that indescribably wonderful sexual experience by just hiring an ideal sex object to make it happen, but oops! That's illegal.

I'm not even going to get into all of the ways you can qualify as a sex offender. Don't get me wrong. I take sexual coercion very seriously. I think, however, that we've gone overboard in how we define it. We're not much better than one of those third world countries in some instances, like so many restrictions on where a registered sex offender can live that some are limited to sleeping under bridges.

OK, enough about our messed up national sex life. If that's abnormal, what's normal? There are plenty of places where sexual mores are more strict than in the U.S. of A., and plenty more where they're more relaxed. I doubt there are many where they are more inconsistent. For the sake of contrast, I'll just tell you of one country I know something about personally, Germany.

One of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world is in Heidelberg. A substantial portion of Germany's population is Catholic, and the Christian Democrat party is one of the nation's most powerful. Membership in the party is not limited to Catholics, and most Orthodox Jews favor the Christian Democrats. Less than a block away from the cathedral is a sex shop, with a large sign proclaiming it as such. The windows are clear, the aisles are wide, the inside is brightly lit, and individuals and couples of all ages come and go openly.

The age of consent in Germany is fourteen. There are special laws to protect a child from coercion, and someone over the age of 21 can be prosecuted for taking undue advantage of the naivete of a 14- or 15-year-old, but it takes a compliant from the minor for a prosecution to occur.

When I've visited Germany, I did not see the overwhelming preoccupation with sex that exists in America. Some women wear revealing clothing, but the average is not at all shocking. While I haven't seen sexually provocative images being used to promote everything under the sun, on one trip I noticed some large posters featuring an attractive oblique rear view of a nude female; erotic, perhaps, but not obscene, and they didn't cause any kind of stir that I was aware of. Nor had anyone found it necessary to deface them or add juvenile sexual comments.

In Heilbronn, when my wife and I visited, there was a display of modern sculptures throughout the downtown pedestrian shopping area. All of these were nude. One which I'm sure would have caused an outrage in most American cities was a bronze of a woman's midsection, legs spread, with an artistic impression of the genitalia. It was interesting but certainly not erotic. I couldn't resist having my wife take a portrait of me, framed by the sculpture. If we wanted to be literal about it, you could say the abstract vagina would have appeared to be a few inches above my head. An elderly couple watching our picture-taking waved and laughed approvingly.

Freiburg im Briesgau is a colorful city of about a quarter million on the edge of the Black Forest, rich with medieval architecture and surrounded by natural beauty. In the center of the city is a plaza with an unusual fountain. Water runs around a circular ceramic trough, through a drain, where it is pumped back up into two square sculptures, about 18" x 18" x 24" high, if memory serves me well, from which it spills back into the circular trough. Very pleasant and restful, and amusing. You see, the the sculptures are chiseled to resemble human forms, one male, one female. The male is returning water to the trough from a small pipe protruding from -- you guessed it -- the groin area. The female, if you take a second look, appears to have her skirt slightly raised and her contribution to the trough is running from between her feet. In other words, both are represented as "peeing" into the trough. Among the families and groups of school children in the area, I didn't see any teachers or parents instructing anyone to close their eyes, and no one seemed the slightest embarrassed. On the city's magnificent cathedral are fearsome gargoyle figures, created in medieval times. Most are placed to direct rainwater away from the wall, typically through a screaming mouth. Many, however, are positioned to take in the runoff through a mouth and discharge it away from the wall via a cloacal opening. Like the fountain, created hundreds of years more recently, these are creative, rather tongue-in-cheek, and don't shock anyone. Except, perhaps, some prudish tourists.

For all practical purposes, prostitution is legal in Germany for anyone over the age of eighteen. The system is not perfect, and the government periodically tries different methods of limiting, licensing, and taxing prostitution. In Munich, near the famous Hoffbrauhaus, is a cabaret named the Lola Montez. In case you don't know, Lola Montez was the stage name of an Irish woman who became a Spanish dancer, then the mistress of Kind Ludwig I of Bavaria, and later moved to California during the gold rush. My wife and I stopped in for a few drinks and watched the nude dancers one evening, and enjoyed watching another interesting show: German efficiency in the world's oldest profession. Three men entered and took a booth not far from us. After about twenty minutes and one drink, three attractive women, obviously summoned by the management, approached the table, and one of them saying almost formally "Also, guten Abend," or roughly, "Well now, good evening." Individual men were approached by individual women. Pairs were approached by pairs. Some male-female pairs moved to tables where privacy could be assured by a curtain. Some left together. But unless we had been traumatized by knowing what was taking place, nothing happened that would have made my wife and me feel uncomfortable, nor did any of the other obviously married couples in the place seem to offended. I'm sure that many Germans would not go to the Lola Montez or any other such establishment, but the clientele certainly was not limited to riff-raff. Given the kind of transactions that were taking place, I have to say it was done rather tastefully.

On another visit to Munich I spent some time in a park along the Issar River, where people of all ages sunbathed, waded, and swam. A few of both sexes went a little distance from the main crowd and changed clothes, stripping naked and putting on bathing suits. No one stared, or objected. I couldn't help thinking how easily any of them could have been arrested in the U.S., and even been labeled as sex offenders.

One evening my wife and I were watching television with another couple. A female reporter was covering a soccer match. The camera followed her into the locker room where she spoke to some of the players as they prepared to shower, standing there for all the world to see, talking to a woman, with it hanging there plain as the nose on one's face. Without self-consciousness or apparent shame. It was a brief segment, and wasn't done for sensationalism. Our friends, both German, laughed a little about it, and said "well, if you want an interview right after the game, you go to the locker room, and in a locker room, people are naked, so?"

If you're one of those people who believe that America is the ideal in every way, you could easily say "well, Fauteck, if you like Germany so much better than the U.S. why don't you get the hell out and go live there!" Fact is, I love America. I also love my grandchildren, but I know they need to grow up, and I think that's true of my country as well, as I've said before. Or you might say "that's just fine for them; it sounds like a place with low moral standards and we just don't want to live like that."

I disagree. Let me just give you three facts to chew on.

Rape is only a third as common in Germany as it is here. America has 4.7 times as many teen pregnancies per capity as Germany, and 3.4 times as many abortions. Still think our moral standards are superior?

I've been to other nations where the attitude toward sexuality is much more conservative than Germany's. I've never been anywhere, or even heard of another place, where it is more inconsistent than in America. We're not oversexed or undersexed; we're just, collectively, sexually confused and obsessed. Just like a sex addict. 

Let's get this out of the way first: "Sex addiction" is not a scientific diagnosis of a mental disorder. If we trace it back, we'd probably find that the term was first used by one of those who think everyone belongs in a half dozen 12-step groups and that any problematic behavior is a disease. As a practical matter, however, I believe most psychologists, even those who are sticklers for correct language like myself, know that there are people whose sexual behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and values are problematic in various ways. If there's such a thing as the collective American psyche, I believe that would describe us.

Let's take a hypothetical male sexual addict. He may be such a prude that he wants bikini bathing suits banned from the beaches, but goes to strip clubs. He's often unable to perform sexually, or avoids sex altogether by pursuing work and hobbies to exhaustion. At other times he's insatiable, and pays for several encounters with prostitutes in one day. He strongly suspects that his wife may be having an affair with a man from their bridge club, and at the same time finds the idea somewhat stimulating. He has mixed feelings about sex education in grade school and thinks the textbooks are sometimes too explicit. Yet he's the one whose jokes at office parties are so off-color that they embarrass others.

Depending on the attitude of his mate, he may eventually join a swinging club and spend an inordinate portion of his time planning get-togethers with other couples.

Or he may wind up divorced, spending most of his spare time at a computer looking for increasingly exotic pornography.

Or he may become celibate, with an occasional binge of sexual adventures.

In other words, his sexual maladjustment has made his overall life to a large extent dysfunctional. I think that describes America.

To be sure, we're not the worst. In my opinion, a nation that allows the "honor killing" of a daughter because she may have been raped simply has no honor. Likewise nations where men are so insecure that they require women to be obscured from public view, or allow women to be subjected to genital mutilation. The collective psyche of those nations is gynophobic and psychopathic. We don't even come close.

But we may be the worst among the major industrialized nations, or what I think of as the most enlightened nations.

The next time I sit at the keyboard, I'll go into detail on this. I'll tell you why I think our sexual attitudes and behaviors are so paradoxical and problematic. But why wait? If there are reasons you agree, please hit the "comment" button. On the other hand, if you think America is well adjusted sexually and I simply have my head up my arse, well, please hit the "comment" button and tell me why.

In Springfield, IL, the tomb of Abraham Lincoln stands in an old cemetary. A simple sign asks visitors to behave in a dignified manner out of respect for our martyred leader. The great man's spirit seems to hang over the place as surely as if he had been gunned down by an American-hating secessionist only weeks ago. He had successfully held our nation together, governing under the banner of a fledgling Republican party, which was fiercely opposed to any further extension of the abomination of slavery. Opposing forces, under the Confederate Battle Flag, started the war that cost more American lives than any other, seeking to split our nation apart.

So grateful was America that for decades thereafter, the Republican party dominated national politics. It would take a long dissertation to outline the evolution of the parties since that time. I'd rather not use GOOD and BAD labels here, explicit or implied, but I think anyone my age who pays much attention to the news has seen how often the two major parties traded positions on important issues, and would have seen that it was integration that motivated southern white Democrats to jump ship en masse and re-invent themselves as Republicans. The national Democratic party had shown that it would use any means necessary to enforce federal law, just as the national Republican party had a century before.

Strangely, we had, as we still have, Republicans who consider themselves good, solid Americans, not standing together and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but standing under the confederate battle flag. The governor of Texas has openly, publicly endorsed secession from the Union.

Excuse me? Wasn't one Civil War enough? Governor, are you an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, or of John Wilkes Booth?

However much I have have disagreed with the majority of Republicans at times in my life, one thing I've always believed you could count on Republicans for was reasonably polite behavior. In a local televised political debate I attended in Ohio, it was the Democrat who broke the rules and interrupted. In the state where I was born, Kansas, Democrats were shadowed by the history of Quantrill's raiders in pre-Civil War days, and the more recent Tom Pendergast, whose thugs used guns and brass knuckles to assure big Democratic turnouts. During the unionization of cab drivers in my home town, it was the unionizers who turned over some cabs. The Republicans more or less calmly pointed out the inappropriateness of this approach, while Democrats quite animatedly railed against the company intransigence that triggered it, while somewhat less animatedly suggesting that the union stick to legal methods.

Republicans or Democrats may have been right or wrong, wise or foolish, at various times, depending on your views, but generally speaking, Democrats might behave like ladies and gentlemen, while Republicans just would. You could always count on a Republican to carry the flag, politely and with respect; the flag of the United States of America.

Recently some Republican leaders announced their plans to disrupt "town hall meetings." I'm not referring to people attending, participating, asking questions. People were sent to disrupt, to prevent, not encourage, discussion. Our elected representatives were shouted down, and peaceful participants were denied the opportunity to ask relevant questions. You know about Congressman Wilson of South Carolina, who shouted an insult at President Obama during his address just last week. That same miserable specimen has a history of calling anyone who disagrees with him an "America hater." I propose to you that it is Joe Wilson who hates America and democratic process, and that it speaks very poorly of his party that he has not been excommunicated long ago. (Predictably, be loves the Confederate flag.)

Anyone who long ago gave up on the Republican party may believe this is not his or her problem. I disagree. For better or worse, we have a winner-take-all system. It would be not impossible, but extremely difficult, to begin a viable third party, or a fourth and fifth, which could introduce more innovation into our political repertoire. But it would not be too difficult for our two party system to become a one-party system; I don't believe that would benefit our nation.

Further, it would be easier than most of us like to think for peaceful dissent to be replaced by social breakdown. That's always very costly. In a heavily armed population, it would be a catastrophy.

If you have differing views on this, which you can express without name calling or threatening my life, I'd like to hear them! Of course you're welcome to comment if you agree as well.

It shouldn't be a joking matter. Medicare fraud hits all of us in the pocketbook, and distracts us from streamlining and modernizing our decrepit healthcare system. Ironically, I remember when Medicare was first proposed, and there were those who screamed about "socialized medicine" then as now, who predicted that millions of larcenous seniors were going to abuse the system. Maybe they meant getting five more minutes with a physician than they were entitled to, but there was always that hint that somehow Grandpa would turn his physician's bills into a condo on the Riviera.

Sorry. It's not those cagey old codgers. It's physicians and other healthcare providers. I haven't heard recently of any hospital corporations defrauding Medicare, but since I know from personal experience that some routinely defraud their patients, I won't be shocked to learn that they victimize the taxpayers as well.

So, why shouldn't they? It's easy money, with very little risk. Just recently an Arizona man got two and a half years behind bars for stealing a quarter million. He had to pay it back, and after he serves his thirty months with however much time off for good behavior, he'll have a few years of probation. Still, when you compare that with the twenty years you can get for stealing $100 with a gun, or the life sentence you could get for a drug offense, it's a pretty high-profit low-risk business.

Another example from some years ago: A certain psychiatrist, who worked part-time in the same court-support agency with me, used to spend a few hours a week doing his private practice billing on his county payroll job. No problem, since it was during downtime. Then it turned out that some of that billing was to Medicare, and over $300,000 of it was fraudulent. Federal charges were filed and he was fired immediately by the circuit court, but it wasn't a great job anyway. I'm sure he had to pay back what he stole, and let's say he was fined a half million bucks (I don't know), but to my knowledge, he never spent a day behind bars.

To other successful psychiatrists whose total honest incomes might be a half million a year or more, that might not seem like a terrible risk. Just like, to the kid in the ghetto, a little time in prison might not seem so much worse than life on the streets.

Truthfully, I wouldn't do it, no matter what. A few years back I got a couple of louvred glass storm doors from a home center, without having paid more than a small deposit. I took the trouble to go to the store, insist they find the record of the sale, and let me pay what I owed. There was a time in my distant past when I certainly would have done no such thing! If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my other website, going-straight.com For the last fifty years I don't take things that aren't mine, I don't steal from people, and I consider paying what I owe in taxes a patriotic duty. I hope that's true of you as well. But for anyone who is easily tempted, who just happens to have an MD or Psy.D. or RN after his or her name, or happens to own a hospital or medical supply company, or for any other reason submits charges to Medicare, the risk is too low.

I liked the guy down the hall, and it would be hard to think of him in a cell, but logically, I know that's what he deserved. When politicians talk about getting tough on crime, they usually mean getting tough on poor people who hurt rich people. I say it's time to get tough, very tough, on rich people who hurt all of us. Maybe in China they'd get a bullet to the back of the head. I don't advocate that. I do advocate giving them seriously long vacations at the Crossbars Resort.

Have you ever wondered why an inch is an inch? According to some sources it started out as a twelfth of a Roman foot. Gee, that helps. In 1150 King David I of Scotland decreed that an inch was the width of a man’s thumbnail at the base. To guarantee some uniformity, it was to be averaged from the thumbnails of a small, medium, and large man. In the 1300s, King Edward II decided to get scientific about it and defined it as three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end-to-end. Later it was twelve poppy seeds. Life must have been hell for carpenters in those days. Since 1959, presumably no further definitions will ever be required because (start Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkyrie" as background music here) metric to the rescue! The inch was officially defined as 2.54 centimeters!

How much is a centimeter? Simple. It’s 1/100 of a meter. Of course, there’s an in-between measure, the decimeter, which isn’t used so much as a measure of length, but a cubic decimeter is a liter, which is a standard measure of volume.

See how nicely it all fits together? Multiply a meter by a thousand and you get a kilometer. Divide it by a thousand and you get a millimeter. By comparison, there are twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 5,280 feet in a mile. Our scientists have long since been thinking in milligrams and kilograms, centimeters and millimeters, and when the old system inserts itself, the results vary from funny to disastrous. (Don’t ask me for specifics: You know how to use Google!)

The Celsius scale for temperature is also beautifully simple. Water freezes at zero, and boils at one hundred. There’s also the Kelvin scale, which I don’t know much about. It’s based on absolute zero, and it’s only applicable in outer space, in cryogenics, and in Chicago at Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in January.

OK, now this means something new to learn, right? I’m used to thinking of a 12-ounce bottle of beer, a hundred-yard football field, how many extra POUNDS of blubber I carry around my middle, and so on. I know my waist size in inches. I know how far it is from my home to the nearest town in miles. At my age, those templates won’t be easy to dislodge. (Although I read and travel enough that I also have wispy metric and Celsius templates to draw on.) Contrary to what a quick learner some of my professors called me, I can be thick headed when it comes to change. As a writer, I fought tooth and nail against converting to an electric typewriter, and later, to a computer, which I now can’t live without. Having learned to drive quite nicely the old stick-shift way, my conversion to automatics nearly caused some major accidents. Only a left knee injury that makes the clutch pedal a torture device took the stick shift out of my life for good.

So it will be an inconvenience to some. But the time is here. There’s so much our kids need to be learning in this day of mushrooming knowledge, let’s not continue to saddle them with an archaic system of measures. We can go on thinking in pounds and miles, we can still say "I won’t give an inch," but before we know it, metric will be natural and easy for all of us, even us old geezers. Most important, it’s one more way in which we can catch up with the rest of the world, for our own good.