Swickard column: Windy boy windy for New Mexico

Columbia loaded for trip home- George Swickard
© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  After college my first professional job was in television production. The Albuquerque station had a weatherman who was interesting because he was not from New Mexico. The annual spring winds upset him. In fact, when you asked about the next day’s weather anytime during the year he answered, “Windy boy, windy.”
            And it is time for New Mexico’s annual spring winds. Some people are quite upset with them while the rest of us usually shrug and go about our business. Sometimes we even find humor in the winds.
            A tourist from back east pulled up to a restaurant at the same time as me and was having trouble keeping ahold of his hat. “My God,” he exclaimed with a look of horror at the dust and debris flying by, “Does the wind always blow like this in New Mexico?”
            “Nope,” I said and smiled. “Sometimes it comes from the other direction.” The man was shocked by the violence of the dust. I could not resist. “But the wind right now isn’t blowing enough to pick up scorpions and rattlesnakes so you should be fine. Watch out when the wind really picks up, they can drop right out of the sky.”
            The man could not get out of New Mexico quickly enough. Our Chambers of Commerce hate it when we play with the tourists. And in March and April each year there is plenty of wind to play with tourists. The truth is that if you were born in New Mexico and the winds in spring start blowing dust, you will not have a surprised look on your face.
            One bright spot if you are heading east. A couple years ago I went from Las Cruces to Roswell almost not using any gas in my truck. I felt pretty good about the wind until I drove back to Las Cruces and almost used a tank of gas.
            I feel bad for high profile vehicles since the wind often plays the devil with handling and sometimes even just keeping all four wheels on the ground. Some of the roads in New Mexico are closed in bad dust storms because there can suddenly be zero visibility with the possibility of a big wreck involving many vehicles.
            One of the almost lost stories of wind in New Mexico involves the only time when a NASA Space Shuttle landed in our state. More to the point, what is rarely referenced is the windy day before Space Shuttle Columbia landed.
            In 1976 Northrup Strip was selected by NASA as a Space Shuttle training and backup landing facility. We now call that facility the White Sands Space Harbor at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. New Mexico was halfway between shuttle landing areas at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
            STS-3 was launched in March 1982 as a seven-day mission but excessive rain in California flooded the landing area there. So the Northrup Strip at White Sands Missile Range was selected. However, it was spring wind season. On the scheduled landing day, it was a nasty dusty day of high winds and low visibility.
            The network news programs showed a New Mexico straight out of a Chamber of Commerce nightmare. It looked like a hurricane except it was dust instead of water. One reporter opined that the Space Shuttle Columbia might never be able to land in New Mexico.
            Not so. The next day at about nine in the morning it was a glorious New Mexico morning as if there had never been a dust storm. About twenty thousand people were at the landing strip and millions watched on television as Columbia landed. So we rarely mention the Wind Hall of Fame day that proceeded the landing.
            Best way to deal with the wind is to expect the coat of dust and not get too worked up about it. We have been having these dust storms in New Mexico for the last two-hundred and eighty million years, come next August so don’t be surprised.
            My advice: get yourself a beverage and stay inside with a good book. It’s going to be windy boy, windy.

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Swickard: The magic wand of work

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” Thomas Edison
            The New Mexico Legislature has ended and there are people in our state who were wanting those politicians to change the sad plight of New Mexico, which is last in almost every category in our nation. They are disappointed that despite the politician promises at election time New Mexico remains poor.
            If past performance is a predictor of future performance it is a good bet that New Mexico ten years from now will still be last in most categories. Why, because the Legislature does not have a magic wand to wave over the Land of Enchantment to bring wealth to every citizen.
            Yes, legislation can help citizens who want to lift themselves out of poverty. Legislation can make New Mexico more attractive for businesses. But the heavy lifting of changing the fortunes of New Mexico must be done by the citizens themselves.
            It starts with a work culture. New Mexico suffers from a culture of not working. Right now more New Mexicans are not working than are working. The poverty programs in our state make it hard to take a job for pay when the pay will nullify benefits. And the state does nothing since the poverty programs employ many people and give power to the leaders.
            Question: when do most people who get a job do so? The week after their unemployment benefits end. Or, and this is important. They get a job almost immediately after losing a job. One or the other. I’m painting with a large brush, but we have two cultures.
One says “I work proudly.” The other rides government programs until they end and then despairs. Those who go for a year between jobs while milking the system find it hard to get a job when benefits run out.
            However, some sectors such as the Agriculture Industry are full of proud workers. If they do not like a job they hunt another before moving on. The Oil and Gas Industry have men and women who do not watch the clock, they get the job done.
            But as an employer myself and manager of hundreds of workers over the last forty years I find many young people are not taught to work. No, not that you need a 13/16 socket to take out a spark plug. They do not know you must be on time always. In fact, be five minutes early so if traffic snarls you are not late.
            This all starts in public schools which should not propagandize but should provide many examples of enjoying work. The magic wand, if you want to think of it as such is attitude. Thomas Edison looked forward to going to work each day because he liked to work. Those people who enjoy being employed are important.
            Many people in New Mexico think that wealth comes from the government and all you have to do is have one of your relatives get elected to some office and the wealth truck will make regular deliveries. And in our crony corrupt state that is more true than not. But it cannot and will not last.
            What happens to these people when their relative is caught and cannot provide any more loot? Then they turn to drugs for quick cash. Some New Mexicans have no Social Security benefits because they never have worked officially.
            The attitude that is important is to find things about the job that prepare you for the next job. We hear so much about minimum wage jobs but most people only make the minimum wage for a few months and then are promoted beyond it if they apply themselves.
            If it is easier to float on the government programs than actually go to work this will come to the end at some point. At some point the problems of our budget and debt will intrude. We are spending money that we do not have.
            Who will ride out the hard times the best? Those who can hunker down working at any job and being satisfied with making money rather than having it given to them. They have the magic wand of work.

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Swickard: New solutions for poverty and illegal drug use

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.    Comedian W. C. Fields joked, "The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep." That is like the solutions our leaders have for America's problems of illegal drug use and poverty. Over the last sixty years our leaders have filled to overflowing our court system with non-violent illegal drug users. And our leaders have dramatically increased the number of people on welfare.
            Neither solution over the years has even started to eradicate the problems. Worse, it seems the best minds in our society can only come up with things that make the problems worse. We have more illegal drug use and more poverty now after spending billions of dollars.
            Tragically both leave lots of human carnage in their wake and lost opportunities for generations. It would be nice if we apply Thomas Edison's view of failure. He referred to inventions that didn't work by saying, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." In each case he tried something different.
            Our leaders cannot see different solutions for poverty and illegal drug use other than what we have been doing for sixty years. Albert Einstein said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
            Part of the problem is that crime and welfare are huge industrial complexes with billions of dollars to employ people. If you no longer need all of those police and prison workers do we have anyone who could fire a million government workers? Politically it is impossible. But it needs to be done.
            Poverty is not because other people are successful. Poverty is because people do not have the desired productive skills or inclinations to use their skills. Welfare stalls people from jobs because they lose benefits.
            Poverty doesn't cause crime. Criminal behavior and illegal drug use are mental illnesses. I am not saying ignore or release them because it is an illness. But before we find a solution we must correctly identify the problem. We must frame as mental illness the disregard of society's rules.
            Putting millions of Americans into the legal system because of their choice for themselves of taking drugs does not work. One approach is to view illegal drug use as a health problem rather a criminal offense. Portugal did so in 2001. The results are compelling.
            I am not involved in the illegal drug question personally. A few years ago a speaker said, "All you people from the sixties spent your time in college partying and smoking dope." I raised my hand and said, "Did not!" If drugs were all legal I would still only be medicated by coffee and green chile.
            The reason I am looking to Portugal along with twenty-five other nations is that over fifty years as a journalist I have watched our drug policies fail miserably. Drugs are as available now as fifty years ago, according to people who know.
            I believe that the correct direction for our country was mentioned by Herbert Hoover in 1928 as he was campaigning to be elected President of the United States. He said, "We have not yet reached the goal but... we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation. There is no guarantee against poverty equal to a job for every man."
            Our nation can become great when we allow people to become more productive, to use their natural talents and abilities in jobs. Jobs are the great changer of a society. The free market is the engine of prosperity. The enemy of prosperity is government people who want to control the free market.
            Every rule or regulation that diminishes the ability of people to be productive moves people toward poverty. It is not something that can be legislated. Everyone is either moving toward poverty or not. Change the drug laws to treat it as an illness and not something to fund our vast law-enforcement/judicial/prison industries.
            I hope Winston Churchill was right when he wrote, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." We've tried all those things that don't work, let's try something different.

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Swickard: SJR 1 has a serious defect

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  "The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business." Henry Rollins
             I have written many times about the prison-industrial complex in New Mexico and our nation. Millions of dollars go to law-enforcement and the judicial-industrial complex for justice. From the pettiest of crimes to the most pernicious, the judicial system rides herd over thousands of citizens.
            Then there are prisons with all of the staffing. Somewhere in all of this money come bail bondsmen. There is something aimed at them that is not a good idea.
            This session in the New Mexico Legislature a proposed Constitutional Amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 1, involving bail reform doesn't mean what people think. The test is easy. Another bill with the same language except for one provision, House Joint Resolution 13, is being offered and is said to be dead.
            The news media and casual observers may not see what is happening but the attorneys in the Legislature certainly do and they are "game-on" for this windfall. What is the one provision?
            That if someone is arrested and goes before a judge instead of having to post a bond saying they will make their court appearance, they can be released if they are poor and are not violent. For them no bail will be required.
            The easy sell on both measures is that Judges will have more power to keep violent people in jail without any chance of being released before their trial. That is a big push for a safer New Mexico. Many people are injured because a violent offender reoffends while on bail. The second set of victims naturally feels that the offender should have been kept in jail. So that change in New Mexico Constitutional Law is needed.
            The "More money for defense lawyers" provision in SJR1 which is missing from HJR13 involves that some people are kept in jail when they cannot arrange bail. Sometimes bail is ridiculously low such as one hundred dollars. Jails spend more than that per day housing those citizens.
            What is not being said by anyone but the Bail Industry spokesmen is that most people who can get bail do so by their relatives or friends coming up with the money and property collateral. Who would put up their house for their child if the alternative is to refuse to do so and their child is released for being poor and unable to afford bail?
            When someone is bailed out there are two parties that work together to make sure that person makes their court appointments: the people who provided the money for that person's release and the Bail Bondsman. Both have a financial interest in that person doing the right things.
            If people are just released on their own recognizance, there is not that pressure. Further, the private enterprise of Bail Bonds is such that the risk is weighed on each individual. Some people cannot bond out because no bail bondsman will take the risk. That is good to know.
            Finally, the real push for this provision is to free up resources from the parents and friends for the defense lawyers. Right now they see the bail as taking money from them since the friends and relatives come up with that money. With no bail required that same money that otherwise would go to bail would be available as extra resources for the lawyers.
            With this provision in SJR1 the lawyers see a pot of money glimmering and they assume most people will not think this through. They will just react to the notion of a debtor's prison where people sit behind bars because they don't even have a hundred dollars.
            I would like to see HJR13 pass and be voted on by citizens in November but not SJR1. It is making a bad situation worse and funneling more money to lawyers while ending a private enterprise that minute by minute in our system looks at the flight risk of each person.
            Are their abuses? Of course. But that is no reason to make the system worse.

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Swickard: Mosquitoes like the DDT ban

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." Voltaire
             The newest scare for Americans is a virus just making its way into our country named Zika. It is related to West Nile virus which we already are battling. The problem is we Americans have a cure for mosquitoes but for political reasons we will not use it.
            The way to deal with this epidemic is to kill all of the mosquitoes who spread the disease. While it seems hard to kill all of the mosquitoes, we have almost done it once before but politics gave the mosquitoes a chance to come back fully and kill millions upon millions of people.
            Several years ago two researchers had an article in Forbes, "Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies." This was published September 5, 2012. Dr. Henry Miller and Gregory Conko wrote that Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring" led to a worldwide ban on DDT use. Lacking DDT to kill mosquitoes is responsible for the loss of tens of millions of human lives, mostly children in poor tropical countries.
            They opine, "This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century."
            The insecticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was first discovered in 1874 and in 1939 a Swiss Chemist found it had great insecticidal properties. It was used in World War Two to control malaria and typhus. After the war the use of DDT expanded.
            The discovery of DDT's usefulness won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Mosquitoes were controlled to the point that in just a decade they were seriously on the decline and therefore Malaria deaths were likewise on the decline.
            With no valid data DDT was banned and still is banned due to a political book by Rachel Carson in the 1960s. Malaria death returned and have stayed high. Mosquitoes have brought many other maladies of encephalitis and West Nile virus to the point that New Mexicans are injured or killed each year.
            It is a political campaign to keep DDT on the banned list when it has no known harm to humans and the presumed harm to raptors could not be replicated from Rachel Carson's book. Instead of telling people in New Mexico to put on mosquito repellent and to stay indoors, our government should kill every mosquito.
            Yes, the environmental lobby will not stand for it, but we could try. I have lost two friends to West Nile virus and have no patience for the environmental people who condemn our most fragile populations to death and diseases. If they, the environmentalists wish to die, so be it, but the great martyrs of our world did not send women and children into the wilderness instead of going themselves.
            Every death worldwide to malaria is an unnecessary death. Every death or illness from mosquito born viruses is not necessary. Millions are dying unnecessarily each year. Rachel Carson and her faulty research are responsible for millions of deaths.
            And we are responsible for those deaths because even by the early 1970s it was obvious to our scientists that the loss of DDT was far more harmful to human lives that we had realized before the ban. At that point there should have been an outpouring of information to reverse this ban. There wasn't because environmentalists are rabid about their agenda.
            In the 1950s, while I was living in Japan, early in the mornings the DDT truck would come down our street spraying the mosquitoes. We kids would often play in the mist to no harm other than ants refused to crawl on us for several days.
            Talking the truth gets people attacked because the environmentalists are political not scientific. If you join me in calling for the reintroduction of DDT all over New Mexico to protect our elderly and children you will be attacked. But the lives of our children are worth it.
            I'm all for setting up a Blue-Ribbon panel to investigate this controversy as long as politicians stay out of the way. They know nothing and only react to political causes. I always say to never use a political solution for a non-political problem.
            Mosquitoes are killing our citizens. There should be no politics as to the cure. It's DDT.

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