My original, unimaginative thoughts on blogging for the new year involved more TV criticism, as usual about the forensic-police shows--in which perhaps the most basic design flaw is that the characters who solve homicides in the lab are often the same who run around after the bad guys. Somehow nobody here considers that realistic.

I'll spare my hypothetical readership further complaints about improbably twisted plot lines and get to what's really riled me up. The New York Times can take credit--and, contrary to reasonable expectations, it's not due to a disgustingly slanted piece of "news" or an absurd editorial. While I never have occasion to mess with the paper's analog version, I currently subscribe to a NYT business-news email service (though one might ask why, since I'm not in business, and currently lack resources to invest). It was a NYT service I signed up with in connection with a Yahoo! account, incidentally giving me limited online access to the Times. Recently the purveyors of "all the news that's printed to fit" sent a message linking to their top ten stories of 2004. One, published a year ago, detailed the sordid organized criminal pursuit known as sex trafficking. This is not mere prostitution; in fact, it gives prostitution a bad name. Hell, it gives sex a bad name! The vile practice might as well be known as--and perhaps is sometimes aptly labeled--sex slavery. I'm tempted to remark that this gives even slavery a bad name, which may be overreaching. Yet what I know about slavery in the United States, as legally carried on before abolition, suggests that these old-American slaves' owners treated their human chattel with greater regard--even if merely because of their value as property--than the bloody perpetrators whose racket is described in this article (referenced here but not directly available for free) evidently can find in their miserable psyches for the people whose lives they deliberately ruin and, often, destroy. These parasites don't care.

A word of caution before I rave on: This information was published in the NYT, which has been known, like some other periodicals, to run stories later exposed as false. Editors' confidence in reporters is an insufficient guarantee of truth. I have to wonder, then, how accurate this lengthy account really is. Frankly, I'd prefer it prove totally false; the less reality in it, the better! Maybe I've gotten riled up over nothing. Wouldn't be the first time.

But get riled up I did; I may not have been so murderously inclined toward an evil organization since some seven years ago, when I imagined what I might do to the Algerian terrorists then in the news. Here's the basic story: children and young women from Latin America and Eastern Europe are acquired/recruited through pretenses/shanghaied and smuggled into the United States, generally via Mexico, and, we're told, typically brought to our big urban centers to serve as sex slaves for the unconcerned enjoyment of paying customers (call them clients of evil) and the profit of a particularly low breed of mafiosi. The parallels with the illegal drug trade are obvious.

Yet the greater depravity, when compared with drug trafficking, is also obvious. Rather than dwell on the differences, I'll offer my reaction--which is what journalists really want, isn't it? Four words: Not in MY country! So say I, Derrick Edgar Ronald Hohenburger of Lacus Transversus. It's one thing for the godfathers of whoremongery to lord it over towns they corruptly control in the middle of Mexico, and another to push their foul tentacles into the US and its cities--as if there weren't enough criminals here already!

Just as well (for the bad guys) that I'm on the other side of the country without my own wheels. Should I hit it big, I might look into buying cheap border property in Arizona, where I already have some tenuous connections, just so I could make an impact. A less ambitious option would be to join these guys (more power to them & others who've undertaken similar operations).

Should I ever run across any of these white slavers (to use an old term), if I felt as I did when reading the Times article, I'd be inclined to shoot all the slave-driving bastards on the spot. That wouldn't be enough for their victims, though, who need--to appropriate an expression--kinder, gentler treatment. Sounds like a cause for church/charity--too big a project, admittedly, for a would-be lone ranger.

There, I said it. Don't we feel better now?