My wife and I saw the movie "Man on wire" today at a small theater in Berkeley. It's about a French wire-walker (or, rather, wire-dancer) who somehow got it into his head that he should wire-walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. The movie tells the story of this (harmless) "heist".

Obviously, the symbolism is powerful, and one cannot help contrast this illegal-but-innocent prank with the later events. It is quite striking to see so much footage of the WTC during its construction and in its early days.

Would something like this even be remotely conceivable now? Have we really become so afraid? What, exactly, are we afraid of? Have we really let Bin Laden redefine us into a nation of scaredy-cats?

When was the last time a president asked the country for a real sacrifice?

After September 11, 2001, the president had a once-in-a-century opportunity to ask for such a sacrifice. At that unique moment in time, when all Americans were united, when the world was standing by us, anything was possible. Instead, the president asked us to go shopping.

He blew it. Perhaps he didn't feel the moment. Perhaps he did, and lacked the fiber to chart a bold course. Perhaps he simply could not think of anything to ask of the American people.

That, I think, was his greatest failing. There were many others -- authorizing the use of torture, the (unnecessarily) illegal wiretaps, the never-found weapons of mass destruction, ...

But I keep going back to that defining moment, and the deer-caught-in-headlights reaction. Here was a man who dresses up in a cowboy costume, and was the first president since Washington to wear a military uniform while in office. But he reacted to this enormous challenge with all the resolve of a wet noodle.

This was my generation's defining moment, and he blew it.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Mr. Bush.

Some time ago, a good friend of mine (let's call him Bob) was in the Air Force in the Philippines, where he went to a military hospital for a routine checkup. A doctor came in and looked him over. Bob thought that the doctor was spending a little too much time examining his reproductive organs, but hey, he's a doctor, right?

Once the exam was finished and the doctor left, a nurse came in and told Bob: "The doctor will see you now."

It turns out that the doctor was not a doctor, but an unknown person from outside the hospital. This was not the first this had happened, and he was eventually caught.

Here's the question I want to get to: how serious of a crime was this?

There is no question that this individual was committing a crime, but in this case, Bob took it very well and pretty much laughed the whole thing off. So in this particular instance, this would effectively have been a harmless prank, worthy of a firm slap on the wrist.

But what if Bob had reacted in the opposite manner? What if he had been horrified and traumatized? The crime would now have been very serious, worthy of serious time in prison.

So here we have an instance of a crime whose seriousness depends almost entirely on the victim's state of mind. Legally, this is a difficult concept: our entire judicial system is premised on the idea that the same crime should warrant the same punishment. But I don't know that this is always the right thing to do.

The Supreme Court has affirmed what all reasonable observers have known for some time: torture is illegal, and any prisoners of the United States must be afforded minimum protections. Two questions come up here:

One - since this means that the Armed Forces, the CIA, and the United States government in general have been in violation of the law, does it mean that we are going to see prosecution of the people responsible for such horrors as waterboarding?

Two - what happens if the current administration simply ignores the Supreme Court's ruling? I am betting that very little is going to change. Based on past history, I foresee that things will go on as before, with perhaps lip service being paid to this ruling. If I was a prisoner in Guantanamo, I wouldn't be holding my breath (unless of course my head was being forcibly held under water).

The drug prohibition and so-called "war on drugs" are one of this country's great crimes. Millions of men and women have gone to prison, tens of thousands have died, millions of families have been destroyed, all in the name of a complete fantasy. There have always been, and there will always be, some sort of drug usage in any society. We validate and accept this fact with tobacco and alcohol, which both kill infinitely more people than illegal drugs. It's time to look reality in the face, swallow our pride, and accept the fact that attempting to legislate people's personal choices was a dismal mistake from the start.

I have never used any type of illegal drug. In that respect, I am actually cleaner than a majority of the very people who pass the laws and enforce them. But just because I chose not to use drugs doesn't mean that I want to impose my standards upon everyone else. I only wish this country would come to its senses and end this dreadful aberration.

Since the dawn of humanity, our most powerful instinct has been procreation. This explains why children occupy such a central place in our lives. However, with overpopulation reaching critical levels, humanity is now being forced to find a purpose beyond self-replication.

While reproduction will obviously remain a powerful driving force, many people will go childless. This will in turn give a new meaning to sexual relationships -- from one of procreation, which the Catholic church (for instance) is desperately trying to maintain, to one of personal and social fulfillment. Therefore, non-traditional relationships, in particular homosexual ones, will over time become more accepted. The traditional view of marriage as a stable framework to raise children will gradually change, no doubt over the strenuous objections of those who view it as a God-given sacrament, instead of what it really is: a socially evolved convention that makes sense only as long as reproduction is uncontrolled.

As this evolution is taking place, we can expect increasing tensions between the traditionalists and the progressives. It is probable that there will be temporary backslidings, and we will most likely see certain societies move back, temporarily, towards a more theocratic system of government, as we are already seeing in the Middle East and, to some extent, in the United States.

These regressive tendencies can only be of relatively short duration (on a historic timescale). We have reached the planet's full capacity, and no nation can afford to grow much beyond where it is now. One possible example is Iran, which may be a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the Middle East. In fact, I expect that, as Iran emerges from the dark period of the Islamic revolution over the next few decades, the rest of the Middle East, which has historically been behind, will follow in its footsteps. This will predictably lead to regional tensions between the former fundamentalist regime and the new (and more excitable) ones.

At the same time, secularization is likely to progress at an accelerated rate in those countries where population is already beginning to decline, such as Germany, France and Japan.

As a consequence, there will be an increasing dissonance of values between the two sides of the North Atlantic. Already, marriage is becoming the exception more than the rule in Germany among young people. Similarly, the usage of recreational drugs, which is only frowned upon in Europe (especially Northern Europe), has been fiercely criminalized in the United States, which tends to view it in a quasi-religious context (e.g. forbidden fruit).

It will be interesting to observe those societies that are nominally secular but have a strong religious tradition, such as Turkey and Egypt, where the population curve is only now beginning to slow down. They could go either way as of now, and it is likely that we will see a "boulder" effect (when a boulder starts rolling down a mountain, the direction in which it starts rolling makes a huge difference on its eventual course).

Dulce bellum inexpertis - war is sweet to those who have not experienced it, wrote Erasmus in his Adages, about 500 years ago.

In Iraq, we are going to build the world's largest U.S. embassy, which will eventually house 900 American staff members, plus 600 to 700 Iraqi helpers. This does not include the various consulates and delegations around the rest of the country. This for a country the size of California, inhabited by 24 million people.

Is it just me?