Wading through the government, one missing document at a time . . .

OK, bear with me here. I’m still processing the adventure a friend and I had earlier this week as we attempted to elicit information, of the public record kind, from our country’s federal bureaucracy. I accompanied my friend on a quest for information about a long-deceased relative. Wow. After only a small glimpse into the inefficiencies of, well, everything, we could only wonder how our entire system has not yet imploded upon itself. First, some background:

This relative in question died in the mid-1930s, and my friend’s family knows that he never became naturalized as a citizen of the US. He was still a citizen of his native Italy as of the 1930 census, the only government document my friend has found thus far (found, by the way, via the genealogical website, http://www.ancestry.com). The relative died only a few short years later. My friend’s search this week is for proof of this lack of naturalization. In order to acquire some documents from Italy, he must show that a search has been conducted for naturalization papers and that they have never been found. Dates are sketchy, as the only living relative with information was just a child when this man died, so the family is working from approximations.

My friend, a very organized fellow, had all the paperwork he’d been able to gather thus far carefully compiled in a folder. He’d scoured the websites of the USCIS (that would be the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the …

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On sharing meat and other lucky things

When are we likely to share resources?  At first glance, some of us might say that we share when we have more of something than other people around us.  It’s not that simple, however.

In “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics in the Law,” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby discuss moral heuristics and the evolution of the legal system.  It is a well-written article throughout, though I’d like to focus on one aspect of the article that I found especially interesting.  I’d like to focus on their discussion the circumstances under which people are willing to share and when they are not.

Cosmides and Tooby note that the “hunter-gatherer life is not an orgy of indiscriminate sharing, nor is all labor accomplished through collective action.”  On the other hand, the hunting of large animals often is a social activity and the meat, whether caught by a few or by a large cooperating group, is often shared throughout the social group.  These transfers of meat are “not characterized by direct reciprocation in any obvious way.” Cosmides and Tooby go so far as to suggest that the sharing of meat may be closest to that predicted by Marx’s belief that hunter-gatherers “lived in a state of primitive communism, where all labor was accomplished through collective action and sharing was governed by the decision rule,’ from each according to his ability to each according to his need.'”

The widespread sharing of meat appears to challenge the evolutionary model, which would hold that “selection …

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Hilton Rooming on the State’s Dime

Paris Hilton, reality show star, accidental internet hardcore porn celebrity, and heiress to part of the Hilton hotel fortune is spending the next three weeks in the celebrity wing of the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood for a conviction for drunk driving, driving on a suspended license, probation violation,…

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