In an earlier post, I wondered how God is going to entertain his followers up in heaven for all eternity, especially those who enjoy the less ethereal forms of entertainment (like jet skis).  Now, my question is about hygiene. 

I occasionally look after my neighbor’s two dogs.  Recently, after walking the dogs for about an hour, I noticed that the bottoms of the dogs’ feet were cleaner than the bottoms of my shoes, even though I had stayed on relatively clean sidewalks and the dogs had wandered all over the place — through yards, flower patches, leaves, weeds, etc.  This caused me to wonder why dogs — indeed, all animals except humans — stay surprisingly clean, despite having no access to indoor plumbing.  Why do we humans — built, the Bible says, in God’s image — need so much papaphernalia to stay clean, while other animals do not?  I’m not talking about cosmetics — though that subject is certainly ripe for discussion (if you have ever seen the cosmetics section of a major department store, you know what I’m talking about).  I am also not talking about clothing — the fact that animals (dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc.) can go through all four seasons in Wisconsin without ever needing to shop for a down parka or a pair of sandals, but plenty of humans can’t.  Yet we are, the Fundies say, perfectly designed in God’s image.

Yeah, right. 

OK, so let’s talk about bathing.  For example, consider this thought experiment:  let a dog and a four-year-old child play in the same backyard for an hour, and see which one comes back cleaner.  I challenge any of you to identify a child who would return cleaner that the dog.

Before anyone points out that animals *stink*, let me point out that if humans go without bathing, then we will stink even more than most other animals.  Indeed, my neighbors’ two dogs can go without bathing for a week or longer and still smell fine, but I challenge you to identify any human for whom the same is true.

Which brings me back to the title of this post:  are there bathtubs in heaven?  I shudder to think what heaven would smell like after an few thousand years if nobody ever takes a bath.

Marty Kaplan describes the symptoms and gives a name to “the very real nausea that culture (to use a kind word for it) can cause”:  Attention Sickness. 

First the BIG THING was ANNA NICOLE. Then it was WAR FUNDING. Then it was SANJAYA, and vote-for-the-worst sadism. Then it was CANCER, and our national debate about parental responsibility. Then it was GONZALES, and US ATTORNEY FIRINGS, and MISSING EMAILS. Then it was IMUS, and our national debate about race. Now it’s VIRGINIA TECH . . .

Confronted by these attempts to get our attention, we are pigeons, B.F. Skinner’s pigeons, our nervous and limbic systems automatically responding to the stimuli. Short of retreating to Walden, it’s virtually impossible to escape the onslaught. . . . I can’t believe that the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - doesn’t already list a category like “attention sickness,” a box on insurance forms that shrinks can check off.

This red-alert hype of continuous intentional distraction - OMG! LOOK AT THIS! NO, THIS! NO, THIS! - makes everything seem the same. It’s next to impossible to think proportionately, to give commensurate, differential, appropriate attention to the various info-storms assaulting us.  [I]n the great Skinner box of modern media culture, our higher minds are no match for the sparklies that stimulate us, and which — not incidentally — raise the profits of business and serve the agendas of politics . . .

I just don’t know whether there’s room in my noggin, or in our collective consciousness, for all this stuff, this indiscriminate mix of crap and content. But I do know that it’s really hard to build a progressive political movement, and to keep our eyes on what’s truly important, in an attention economy in the midst of hyperinflation — in a bread-and-circuses culture that is (in Neil Postman’s prophetic phrase) amusing itself to death.

Summary: A scathing, informative chronicle of the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq, yet one that speaks with compelling plausibility of all the missed opportunities to turn things around.

Former U.S. diplomat and ambassador Peter Galbraith has been deeply and personally involved with the affairs of Iraq for over twenty years. In his new book The End of Iraq, he writes of how the Bush administration’s incompetence and mismanagement of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has led to a bloody civil war within its borders. He argues that the only realistic solution to this problem is the partition of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines into three states, and furthermore, that this division has been a long time coming and might have positive dividends both for the U.S. and for other countries in the region.

The Bush administration’s catastrophic ineptitude has long been obvious to an observer of the news, and Galbraith leaves no stone unturned recounting their blunders, some of which are truly staggering. For example, despite Bush’s State of the Union claim (later shown to be false) about how Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Africa suitable for reprocessing into a bomb, the fact is that Iraq actually had pre-existing stores of yellowcake - under International Atomic Energy Agency seal - which the Bush administration made no effort to protect in the aftermath of its invasion, and which was subsequently stolen by looters. Apparently, although the threat of Iraqi possession of yellowcake was so serious as to merit immediate war, the actual yellowcake which Iraq possessed did not justify military protection.

Another stunning example is the al-Qaqaa munitions facility, a complex of bunkers containing hundreds of tons of high explosive which, again, was left unguarded after the invasion and subsequently stolen. Much of this explosive no doubt ended up in the hands of insurgents, where it has been used ever since to fashion roadside bombs and other weapons of destruction to be used against both American troops and other Iraqis. Vials of infectious diseases like polio and HIV, some of which had the potential to be weaponized, were also stolen from Baghdad’s Public Health Laboratory. Despite Colin Powell’s frightening pre-war incantation of Iraq’s plans to create biological weapons, these stores went unguarded for over a week after the U.S. invasion before they were taken.

Other failures, though of less military significance, had enormous cultural significance - such as the U.S. failure to protect Iraq’s museums and libraries, which likewise fell prey to looters who smashed or stole some of the most ancient archaeological remnants of human civilization. Iraq’s National Library was burned down, literally erasing over a hundred years of the country’s history. The Ministry of Irrigation, which was looted and burned, lost the plans and blueprints for thousands of canals, dams and pumping stations delivering the water Iraqis need to live. Yet American troops were ordered to protect one Iraqi government compound, and a cynic could probably have guessed which one: the Oil Ministry, naturally.

The looting and chaos which followed the invasion, and which was not planned for or mitigated, was the first of the Bush administration’s great blunders. But the second part of this one-two punch ensuring the failure of the occupation was its subsequent ham-handed attempt to restore order, in the person of L. Paul Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority administrator. Bremer was dispatched to oversee reconstruction and ended up ruling Iraq like a dictator for months, repeatedly preventing Iraqis from holding free elections because he feared the government they would elect would not be to George W. Bush’s liking. In the meantime, reconstruction was bungled and billions of dollars were squandered by Bremer’s untrained, unqualified political appointees (most of whom were chosen in preference to experienced diplomats because of their conservative political bona fides). The failure to restore even basic services like electricity for months on end cemented most Iraqis’ view of the U.S. as arrogant, incompetent occupiers.

All of these blunders and many others can be laid squarely at the feet of the Bush administration. The highly placed neoconservatives who ruled the White House had grandiose visions of rebuilding Iraq in their own image, as a secular, pro-American democracy. But their plans were conceived in dangerous ignorance of the actual political conditions in Iraq, coupled with hopelessly naive fantasies of how the Iraqis would eagerly welcome us (summed up by Dick Cheney’s comment that he expected them to greet American soldiers as “liberators”). The level of ignorance was astonishing: as recently as two months before the invasion, Galbraith recounts, President Bush not only did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, but did not know what those words even meant. He was unaware that there were multiple sects within Islam. Similarly, Bremer was given only two weeks to prepare for overseeing Iraq, whereas even routine ambassadorial assignments usually involve months of study and preparation. Of such culpably willful ignorance were the seeds of subsequent failure planted.

Today, Iraq is a bloody patchwork of fiefdoms, with Sunni-Shi’ite civil war raging in the streets and a gridlocked government unable to agree on many fundamental aspects of how power will be shared. Ironically, the biggest beneficiary has been Iran, which for twenty years trained and funded the Shi’ite politicians who now hold the majority in Iraq’s government and are steadily moving the country toward an Iranian-style theocracy. For all Bush’s bellicose rhetoric about the “axis of evil”, he has succeeded only in substantially empowering the one member of that group that probably poses America the greatest direct threat.

Galbraith meticulously details all this and more. And yet, in a way, his book is truly fair and balanced. Bizarre though it sounds, even to me, his book has made me aware of the good which the invasion of Iraq has accomplished.

I’m not speaking of absurdly trumpeted reports about how many schools we have painted, nor about how Baghdad’s security has improved because powerful American senators now need only a hundred armed guards and five attack helicopters to stroll through it. No, I’m speaking of Iraq’s oft-forgotten third ethnic group, the Kurds.

The Kurds are the largest single ethnic group in the world with aspirations of creating their own state, which after reading Galbraith’s passionate account (he is a close personal friend of many leading Kurds, including Iraq’s current president, Jalal Talabani), I strongly believe they deserve. The Kurds have been denied their own state since World War I, and have suffered brutally at the hands of many rulers - especially Saddam Hussein, who initiated the genocidal Anfal campaign against them that made extensive use of poison gas. (Galbraith personally played a decisive role in bringing Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds to light in the 1980s.) They have been repeatedly betrayed by many Western leaders, including both Ronald Reagan, who knew of but overlooked Hussein’s atrocities because at the time he was our ally in the Iran-Iraq war, and George W. Bush Sr., who promised American aid to the Kurds if they would rise up to overthrow Saddam and then failed to deliver, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam in retaliation. Even before the war the Kurds were independent in all but name, thanks to the protection of the American no-fly zone. But since the war concluded, they have made little effort to keep up even a pretense of being part of Iraq, and now rule their own territory in apparent peace and security far removed from the chaos prevailing in the rest of the country.

More so, Galbraith’s book convinced me - perhaps unintentionally - that the American invasion did not have to be a disaster. Despite the lies about Iraqi WMD put forth to scare Americans into supporting war, the Bush administration could have succeeded in the aftermath, if only they had planned for it with some marginal degree of realism. They could have rebuilt Iraq, probably not into the pro-American secular client state the neocons wanted, but perhaps a stable and peaceful state governed by power-sharing agreements similar to the ones enacted in Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Galbraith identifies several key points where an image of American competence could have set Iraq on this course, most notably in the first few days after Baghdad’s fall, when the failure to quickly provide security permitted the city to dissolve into a chaos of looting. If we had instead acted swiftly to preserve order and maintain Iraq’s existing government as much as possible, this war might have had a very different conclusion. In truth, it was the Bush administration’s hubris, its incurious and self-satisfied faith in the most wildly optimistic scenarios, that led them to plan for no other outcome and ultimately resulted in the bloody, costly occupation in which we have now become enmeshed.

In its closing chapters, The End of Iraq makes the case that partition of Iraq is now the only feasible option. In truth, I got the strong impression that it was inevitable all along, and that the American invasion only accelerated it. Iraq has never been a unified country with a national identity, such as Japan and Germany were. From the beginning, it was a state created on paper by far-removed imperialists, who drew its boundaries without regard for the mutually hostile and distrustful religious and ethnic groups they had penned in together. Only the ruthless use of force by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors held Iraq together this long. It is into this quagmire, fueled by hundreds of years of rivalry and enmities going back for generations, that America has unwittingly stepped. By pulling out now, we will substantially weaken our position in the region, but that damage was done from the beginning and staying would only make things even worse. The sooner we come to terms with the reality of the situation in Iraq and cast aside the ludicrous dreams of empire which the neocons cling to even now, the sooner we can begin crafting a solution that will prevent the senseless loss of more American and Iraqi lives and that may actually work in the long run.

American culture celebrates the quick fix. Diet pills like Trimspa and Ephedra enjoyed massive popularity despite their health risks because many people want to look healthy without actually living healthfully. Take a diet pill, pop a multivitamin instead of getting nutrients through food, starve yourself- it doesn’t matter how you get trim and slim, just as long as you get there quickly, easily, and without changing your unhealthy habits.

Enter the latest race-to-effortless wellness, Enviga, the “calorie-burning” carbonated tea. Never mind that no evidence supports the beverage’s promise, and that, at best, it cuts the caloric equivalent of a piece of gum. The typical consumer doesn’t take this into consideration. Why does this happen? Probably halfway due to a sheer lack of critical thought, and halfway due to a desperate wish for the product to actually work.

But Coke has found another way to harness the lazy yet health conscious: Diet Coke Plus Minerals. Again, ignore the potential health risks associated with Diet Coke’s no-calorie sweetener, and simply enjoy the beverage for what it means! No longer do you need to seek out vegetables and fruit for nutrients, no longer do you need to take vitamins if you already skip raw foods. Hell, why even drink water? Just gulp down Diet Coke after Diet Coke and then return to your Happy Meals without a worry.

A Jesuit college in St. Louis just won a Missouri Supreme Court case allowing them to get public money, $8 million of it, for their college.  Not being one that believes public money should be spent in support of religion, I was aghast. 

“How could that possibly happen?” you might say.  The answer is rather interesting.  The Jesuits claimed that although it was a Jesuit university (St. Louis University), they didn’t actually govern the school.  No matter that they teach religion, that guys wearing dressing gowns and sandals, and women wearing wimples do some of the teaching, and I’d be surprised if they would grant tenure to someone who was as anti-religion as I am, they claim not to be actually governing the school.

Judge Mary Russell, who wrote for the majority (6-1 decision, a Jewish judge was the only hold out), said, ” The bylaws show a motivation to act under Jesuit or Catholic ideals or beliefs, but aspiration to ideals does not equate to the kind of control of a univeristy’s operation or management that is proscribed by Missouri’s establishment clause.”

I think what she is saying is that the university tries to be Jesuit, but doesn’t do it very well.  Apparently that is what the Jesuits claimed, and the Court bought the argument.  Well, actually Missourians bought the argument since they get to pay for the university’s new gym.

The holdout Judge, Richard Teitelman, (who by the way faced a nasty re-election not long ago because he was the only non-Christian on the Missouri Supreme Court bench), said it best: “The languge in the bylaws is not simply a matter of St. Louis University’s affiliation or tradition; it is a matter of the university’s identity and governance.” 

And by the way, there never was a trial in this matter.  It was one of “summary judgment” meaning basically that no evidence was needed, it was decided as a matter of law.  

A friend called me recently.  The doctor just found a “suspicious” lump and scheduled a biopsy. As you can imagine, she is anxious that she might have cancer.

What can a good agnostic say to such a person? Consider these options:

• I’m worried about you.
• Rest assured that I’m hoping for the best.
• I’ll be thinking about you every hour . . .
• Well, maybe you don’t have cancer, so you might be OK.
• I’m glad you have a good doctor who will give you excellent medical care.

Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):

• I will pray long and often to almighty God to ask Him to intervene to protect you from anything harmful.
• I will ask God to see that you are healed promptly.
• [or even this!] Keep in mind that this life on Earth is temporary for all of us.  But we will be together in heaven forever and I will keep praying for you.

Promising to pray makes it appear that one is really doing something.  It would certainly be much more satisfying to both me and to my friend I I could honestly tell her that I was doing something rather than settling for the agnostic version of prayer (i.e., “I hope it isn’t cancer” or “Would you like to talk about your upcoming biopsy over dinner?”).

The false efficacy of prayer plays into one of the great fallacies of our time, that action—any kind of action—is progress.   Any action is progress.  False logic like this is often employed in our world.  For instance, any action is progress causes many people to believe that any military action (even when the US attacked Iraq–the wrong country–and thereby created huge numbers of new enemies) was appropriate following the 9/11 attacks.  Similarly, when one prays (which has never been scientifically proven to be effective at thwarting disease), one feels like one is doing something, implying progress. 

I admit that it would feel better to call on God, the ultimate bodyguard, to fight off my friend’s possible cancer.  I know that it would be satisfying to believe in prayer. I used to say prayers when I was a young child who was forced to go to church.   I was half-convinced that I was doing something to end world hunger by praying.  Or that I was increasing my odds of doing well on a test at school.  I think I believed in prayer as a result of watching my mother, who prayed that the car would start on cold days (and it often did). If a “Hail, Mary” didn’t turn over the V-8 engine of that big Oldsmobile, she pulled out the big artillery: she switched to “Our Fathers.”

My friend who is facing the biopsy is a church-going friend who has many theist friends.  They have undoubtedly already told her that they will pray for her. I’m sure that these promises bring my friend great satisfaction.   And all I can do is to sit around hoping and fretting for her.

How nice it would be to have prayer in one’s arsenal.  I’m jealous. (more…)

This long awaited report had been authorized by Congress in 1997, according to the Washington Post.  Here are the results:

A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

The federal government spends $176 million a year on abstinence-only education, and millions more are spent every year in state and local matching grants.

The Post quoted a sex-ed expert,

“Comprehensive education means teaching about abstinence and a myriad of other topics,” said spokeswoman Martha Kempner. Among them, she said: “contraception, critical thinking, one’s own values and the values of your family and your religious community.

“Abstinence-only was an experiment and it failed.”

Nancy Keenan of Naral also weighed in on the results of the study:

“Independent studies continue to demonstrate that Bush’s abstinence-only approach is a failure.  Not only are they ineffective, the programs mislead our teens and censor teachers from giving students the truth about contraception.   Congress and this administration should support honest, age-appropriate, and medically accurate sex education that promotes abstinence and provides young people with the information they need to protect themselves.  Honest sex education is the only approach that works.”

It never takes long for people to exploit a tragedy when they have something to gain from doing so.  President Bush, who has done virtually nothing notable this year, has dropped whatever he had on his calendar for today so that he can swoop down on Virginia Tech, the site of yesterday’s student massacre.  Likewise, Virginia’s governor is flying back from Japan, so he can show his face to the crowd.  Of course, the MSM has already landed and capitalized on the tragedy, by interviewing anyone and everyone they can find, especially people who were shot. 

These scavangers will probably all try to convince us that the incident is somehow worthy of national — nay, international — attention, when plainly it is not.  It is not an arument for stricter national gun control, as the Europeans seem to believe.  It is not an argument for more breaches of the U.S. Constitution…er, I mean stricter “homeland security.”  It is not an argument for tighter visa requirements for international students and other visitors.

No, I think the following quote from the Swedish press accurately describes the incident:  “What exactly triggered the massacre in Virginia is unclear but the fundamental reason is often the perpetrator’s psychological problems in combination with access to weapons.”

Yes, psychological problems in combination with access to weapons is often the reason for a massacre.  We should know:  we’ve seen it before.

Howard Zinn recently spoke on patriotism on DemocracyNow:

Patriotism to me means doing what you think you’re country should be doing. Patriotism means supporting your government when you think it’s doing right, opposing your government when you think it’s doing wrong. Patriotism to me means really what the Declaration of Independence suggests. And that is that government is an artificial entity.

Government is set up–and here’s what a Declaration of Independence is about, government is set up by the people in order to fulfill certain responsibilities: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And according to the Declaration of Independence when the government violates those responsibilities, then, and these are the words of the Declaration of Independence it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government.

In other’s words the government is not holy, the government is not to be obeyed when the government is wrong. So to me patriotism in it’s best sense means thinking about the people in the country, the principals for which the country stands for, and it requires opposing the government when the government violates those principles.

So today, for instance, the highest act of patriotism I suggest, would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Simply because everything about the war violates the fundamental principles of equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, not just for Americans, but for people in another part of the world. So, yes, patriotism today requires citizens to be active on many, many different fronts to oppose government policies on the war, government policies which have taken trillions of dollars from this country’s treasury and used it for war and militarism. That’s what patriotism would require today.

Noam Chomsky was also part of the discussion, which can be found in its entirety here.  The participants drew in-depth comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.

We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States.   Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded.

Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should. 

But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians are dying each and every day in Iraq.   For the Iraqi civilians, it’s as though they’ve been going through a Virginia Tech massacre every day for four years.  But how often do we feel any deep empathy for those innocent Iraqi victims?  How hard do we have to look to find even one microscopic story buried in the back pages of the newspaper about the grief felt by the parents of a recently murdered Iraqi child?

The Virginia Tech episode reminds us how horrible it is to be hunted down by people with weapons.  To be hunted like rabbits.  To have people trying to kick down doors to kill you and people you care about the most.  It has happened far too often as a result of American weapons.  It has happened more than I can bear to think about, even judging by the estimates of those who count dead Iraqi bodies conservatively.   

There’s not really a lesson here, merely an observation.  When people die in great numbers, it’s not a big deal to us, unless the dead people are Americans.  

A reader recently submitted this suggestion to Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish:

As far as anti-war arguments go, why hasn’t anyone simply stated that they’re trying to protect the soldiers from President Bush, rather than the insurgents? Just saying we should end the war provides far too many opportunities for Bush & Co. to say, “the soldiers want to stay until they accomplish their mission” or “the soldiers want to stay and win.”

Of course they do. We all want them to win. But the simple fact is that they can’t win when they have the huge handicap Bush’s leadership gives them. I just really wish someone in the opposition party would call the President’s and war’s defenders out on this, and simply say, “I’d love to win the war as well. But we have to protect the soldiers from our President’s delusions.” Make Bush out to be our soldiers’ greatest threat, and force the supporters to prove he’s competent.

From Alec Baldwin at Huffpo: 

Let’s chat about how the Army exploits economically deprived minorities and offers them careers in the military. Cash, clothes, a car. (Don’t hold your breath for that armor plating, though.) Some of these men have criminal records, which the Army, in order to meet recruitment numbers, has chosen to increasingly overlook. The Army is pitched as a chance to start your life over. To do something meaningful. To be somebody. To be a part of something where guns and aggression and codes of honor are taken out of the illegal gang arena and shifted over to “serving the American people.”

Don’t get me wrong. We need an army. Sometimes, we need to fight to uphold what we believe . . .

I don’t know why the Pope constantly gets such intense press coverage. I know he is the leader of a large church, but he most often speaks in platitudes, double-speak or with dark-ages insight.  Here’s a good example–his recent muddled pronoucement on evolution.   

According to the Associated Press, Pope Benedict XVI has concluded that the scientific theory of evolution “cannot be finally proven and that science has unnecessarily narrowed humanity’s view of creation.” Though he generally praised scientific progress, the Pope “cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions science alone cannot answer.”

“The question is not to either make a decision for a creationism that fundamentally excludes science, or for an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science,” the pope said.

He stopped short of endorsing intelligent design, but said scientific and philosophical reason must work together in a way that does not exclude faith.

“I find it important to underline that the theory of evolution implies questions that must be assigned to philosophy and which themselves lead beyond the realms of science,” the pope was quoted as saying in the book, which records a meeting with fellow theologians the pope has known for years.

[T]he theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

Maher says it well: 

Say it loud: I’m elite and proud! The right-wing crusade to demonize elites has paid off. Now the country’s run by incompetents who make mediocrity a job requirement and recruit from Pat Robertson’s law school. New rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word liberal, they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite,” or as it’s otherwise known, “hating.” They’ve had it up to their red necks with the “elite media.” The “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is influenced by “the Hollywood elite.” . . .

I don’t get it: In other fields — outside of government — elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad — the elite aren’t down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. But when the anti-elite crowd demonizes the elite, what they’re actually doing is embracing incompetence.

But in the Bush administration experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is loyalty to Bush and Jesus, in that order.

For the full post, see here.  If you’d rather watch it than read, click here.

This article in the Boston Globe  comments on a recent survey of teens regarding financial matters:

American teens believe, based on the career that interests them the most, that when they get older they will be earning an average annual salary of $145,500. Interestingly, boys expect to earn an average $173,000 a year and girls $114,200, according to the findings of Teens & Money, an annual survey released last month by Charles Schwab & Co. and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Nearly two-thirds of teens surveyed by Schwab said they were prepared to deal with personal finance issues once they graduated from high school. The majority said they were knowledgeable about money management, including budgeting, saving, and investing. But fewer than half of the teens surveyed knew how to budget. Others didn’t know how to pay bills, how credit card interest and fees work, or whether a check cashing service is good to use (it’s not).

I assume that the teens are stating what they’ll earn in today’s dollars.  If not, they could be on target.  If inflation gets roaring (thanks to our irresponsible national fiscal policy) they might actually, on average, make $250,000 per year, which might be the cost of a can of chili in the year 2020.

Seriously, though, I have to wonder how those teens get those average numbers.  The only people I know who make that kind of money are people willing to work grueling 60-hour weeks in a profession that pays especially well.

Connie is a well-informed writer who hits the nail right on the head while addressing the FCC. Just ignore the sync problem with the vido and listen to five-minutes of an experienced reporter who illustrates the problem succinctly and eloquently.

 At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates.  The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists.  Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.

This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:

Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.

This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:

• At least I know that my dead aunt is now in heaven; or
• I prayed that my son would get that new job and God answered my prayer; or
• Jesus loves us. 

Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me.  The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me.  These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society.  Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually nothing more than harmless self-comforting poetry uttered by gentle, tax-paying, yard-pruning and otherwise admirable people.

In my experience, most religious moderates maintain warm and mutually beneficial relationships with non-believers and with people of other faiths.  Sometimes, they even admit to having doubts about their own religious beliefs.  Given these circumstances, why in the world would non-believers ever want to challenge the innocuous-seeming assertions of religious moderates? 

Is there really a problem, then, when I fail to speak up when religious moderates publicly make their “mild” proclamations of faith in mixed company (believers and non-believers)? 

I’m not advocating for dramatic or harsh confrontations with religious moderates.  Such straightforward conflict would lead to hard feelings and a quick end to any dialogue.  In fact, it risks tipping religious moderates (many of them fence-sitters) into fundamentalism. 

Then again, the cumulative effect of failing to point out our differences when religious moderates make unsupportable religious claims might lead them to think, incorrectly, that my silence constitutes my agreement with their fantastic claims regarding Gods and spirits.  I’m not alone in my general reluctance to cause a scene when religious moderates say such things.  I would go so far as to conclude that the aggregate implied acquiescence by non-Believers over the years has encouraged ever-more public God talk (much of it by government officials), much of it in mixed company.

There are several serious problems with this public God-talk.  It is hopelessly vague, it has been honed in the “factory” of thoughtless repetition and it is used (albeit unconsciously) to coerce non-believers into a polite silence that looks like (but isn’t) acquiescence or even encouragement.  Here’s another serious problem: Isn’t honesty the best policy? 

To address these commonly encountered situations where religious moderates publicly blurt out their mild proclamations of faith, I am hereby inviting non-believers to carry around printed Miranda-style warning cards. The Mirada warning is a method of succinctly boiling down a complex set of legal concerns into a few statements–police officers often carry around little cards listing the elements of the Miranda warning. 

My proposed Religious Warning Card boils down a complex set of epistemological/religious concerns into a few gentle reminders.  I’m attaching a word processing file here, in case you really want to print a set of your own.  Miranda style warning for religious moderates - Cards.doc  These cards are designed to be handed to friendly acquaintances whenever they lapse into making factually unsupportable religious claims:

–Gentle Reminder to a Theist Acquaintance–

You have publicly made a religious claim that is vague or has no trustworthy basis in fact. If I had remained silent, you might have erroneously assumed that I agreed with you. Because I value our relationship, though, I am hereby taking this moment to advise you of my disagreement.  I am handing you this card to remind you of my beliefs:

• There are no invisible sentient beings such as Gods, spirits and ghosts.
• When people die, they are completely dead. They don’t “go” anywhere.
• The ancient religious scripture on which you rely is untrustworthy because it is vague, self-contradictory and historically unsupported.
• To best understand life one should employ a naturalistic worldview free of supernatural elements.
• There are many important things about life that humans simply don’t know and it is important to acknowledge our ignorance.
• I judge morality entirely on whether people demonstrate kindness to one another, not on religious beliefs.

This Warning Card shouldn’t be shoved in anyone’s face, of course.  It should only be used as a gentle reminder that those who hand it out don’t believe in imaginary supernatural beings. (more…)

This article from LiveScience shows what incredible things can be accomplished when scientists search hard to find even a bit of surviving soft tissue in a T-rex femur:

An adolescent female Tyrannosaurus rex died 68 million years ago, but its bones still contain intact soft tissue, including the oldest preserved proteins ever found, scientists say. And a comparison of the protein’s chemical structure to a slew of other species showed an evolutionary link between T. rex and chickens, bolstering the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs . . . A comparison by Asara’s team of the amino-acid sequence from the T. rex collagen to a database of existing sequences from modern species showed it shared a remarkable similarity to that of chickens.

Our black cat died at sunset on Friday the thirteenth. Just then it started to rain. My real life often lends itself to overused literary metaphors.

It was an assisted departure, as the nearly 23 year old cat was so clearly on her uncomfortable and imminent way out. The vet made a house call, and Punkin died quickly in Karen’s arms on the sofa after a leisurely last meal of tastes of several of her favorite foods. She barely ate during the last two weeks.
We buried her in the back of our garden, standing in the gentle drizzle as dusk closed.

I recall a chunk of verse I wrote to my regular readers about this same cat back in 2002. Here is the missive I sent back when:

my crunchy eyes see grainily
that early dawn grays rainily
as cat black yowls operatically
like she does at night sporadically
from rusty fingers words now clack
and I yowl back to loud cat black
but, little to say and much to do
so one last line and then, adieu.

Don’t yall jest hate it when words just seem to wriggle their way out and insist on finding readers? Well, this mornings narcissistic ramble brought to you by those fine folks at Sleep-Be-Gone, providers of neurotic aged felines and their dander.

This verse about our sweet petite carnivore was in response to her new habit of voice. For her first 17 or so years, she was silent. She only mimed “meow” even in the most evocative of circumstances. Once she began this habit of loud exposition, often with no provocation, she kept it up until a few weeks ago. Her newfound quietness was another in a series of recent and increasingly pointed signs that she had completed her tenure here.
But her demeanor and disposition remained sweet until the end. This is very unusual for a creaky, old, arthritic cat.

She was surprisingly spry in her late teens (call it her 90’s, in human terms), as seen in this unposed shot from early 2002. She got up there on her own, and turned around on that uneven 3″ beam.

I have a few more small pictures of her up on www.danklarmann.com/punkin

For a long time now, I’ve been deeply frustrated and annoyed by the ongoing use of the term “war” to describe the situation in Iraq.  Pardon me, but the “war” in Iraq ended several years ago, when all of their troops surrendered.  What we have there now is a military occupation.  You might think this is an unimportant matter of semantics, but it is not.  It is a very useful matter of semantics if you happen to be a Bush-loving, neo-con Republican. 

Why is a “war” better than a “military occupation?”  “War” implies a threat, which makes garnering public support much, much easier.  “War” demands money.  “War” demands resources.  “War” demands increased military production.  “War” demands lives.

“War” is romantic, attracting both patriotic individuals who want to serve their country, and military and political leaders who want to cloak themselves in it.  Bush supporters like to call him the “war president” — do you think any would call him the “military occupation president?”

“War” justifies autocratic leadership.  “War” justifies sacrifices in personal liberties.  “War” justifies espionage, both at home and abroad.  “War” justifies sending large numbers of soldiers to be killed or maimed.  “War” justifies killing people, even innocent people.  “War” justifies prison camps.  “War” sometimes even justifies torture.  When does a military occupation justify any of this?

“War” creates images of valor and heroism.  “War” creates the myth of an innocent nation fighting back to protect itself.  “War” creates “the enemy.”  And not just any ordinary enemy (e.g., a terrorist hiding in an Afganistan cave), but a worthy enemy:  “global terrorism.”  Who is the enemy in a military occupation?  Insurgents.  Locals.  Nobodies.

In sum, “war” is what neo-con Republicans want every American to call the situation in Iraq, because this one word gives them more power than they could possibly get any other way.

It is time we stop calling it “the war in Iraq,” and time we start calling it what it is:  the military occupation of Iraq.  This is not just semantics.  It is a matter of life and death.

Paul Rieckhoff, who has already served in Iraq, describes the crushing burden of the newly instituted 15-month tours of U.S. soldiers of Iraq:

The current force level in Iraq is unsustainable, and is breaking the back of our armed forces. Like so many other choices made by the Bush Administration during this war, extending Army tours to 15 months is merely a half-measure move to cover up the much larger problem of a poorly planned war with an unprecedented operational tempo and a military structure that is simply too small to fight two protracted wars for five years.

This comment to Rieckhoff’s piece is a thought that repeatedly occurs to me: “As much as I hate to say it, I’m starting to think reinstating the draft is a good idea, as it would cause a lot of apathetic Americans to WAKE THE HELL UP!”

There I was, minding my own business, when WHAM! I was damned to hell. Thankfully, my salvation is being actively prayed for, so maybe, just maybe, I still have a chance.

OK, well, perhaps “minding my own business” is a bit of truth-stretch. I was actually stirring a pot, just a little. Not sure why; I guess I found myself momentarily bored with all this academic writing I’m doing in the throes of the end of the semester and thought I’d wander around trolling for an argument. Er, discussion, I mean.

Background: As my profile states, my primary function in life is to be the mother of two daughters, both of whom happen to have been born in China. They are perfect, by the way, just in case anyone wondered. But the oldest is fast approaching her teen years (ACK!) and most of our time is spent butting heads in that proverbial, old-as-time mother-daughter way.

ANYWAY, I have remained a member of our adoption agency’s Yahoo group for years, often serving as a reference for the agency or a “buddy family” for someone traversing the adoption process. I enjoy it, and since we’ve been a family for 11+ years now, I can sometimes offer adoptive parenting advice. That’s the other thing about my oldest - she examines every emotion and every aspect of her life with a microscope and a fine-toothed comb. We’ve had every conceivable adoption/missing birthfamily/looking different conversation known to humankind. So I share. Usually, my thoughts are met with appreciation, or people ignore me. Not so this time.

The agency we used is openly based on Christian principles. This was never discussed during our adoption process other than being noted in the initial information packet. No one ever preached to us. We were extremely satisfied with all aspects of the process. The first time this religion thing became an issue for me personally was just a couple of years ago, long after both of our adoptions were final. A fellow adoptive parent and friend went to work for the agency, and confided in me at one point that she was uncomfortable with all the praying going on at work. They prayed during staff meetings. She was a Christian, but Catholic, which apparently many *other* Christians don’t actually consider Christian. I had no idea.

Regardless, it bothered her and I empathized that it would bother me as well. She went on to tell me that when she had been hired for the job, she was asked to sign a statement of faith. Because she does consider herself a Christian, she signed it, but wasn’t terribly comfortable with it. She left the job soon after, and we both went about our lives.

Over the last couple of days, in some thread of discussion on the group’s message board, this topic of the agency being “faith-based” was mentioned. A former employee and fellow adoptive parent confirmed that it is true, and in her response mentioned the aforementioned statement of faith. Many weighed in - it’s a big deal, it’s not a big deal. It bothers one, doesn’t bother another.

I weighed in on the bothered side, not that they were a faith-based agency but that they would limit their potential employee pool this way. I gave the example of a friend of mine, a social worker, who had expressed interest in applying there for a job awhile back. I told her that she would be phenomenal, but I also warned her of what I’d heard, telling her not to be too disappointed if she was not hired; she is Jewish.

A couple of others were also bothered by this whole employment issue. We all understood that it was certainly the agency’s right to do this, we merely expressed our disappointment that they’d made such a choice. Back and forth we went, around and around again. But the entire discussion, even though there were obviously two diametrically opposed sides, was respectful and unfettered by ugliness. The board moderator posted that currently no one is being asked to sign such a statement, and there are non-Christians working for the agency at this time. Cool.

But a bit of the ugliness crept in when one poster insisted that those of us who felt excluded had no right to feel that way - unless we’d applied for a job there and been turned down.

I responded by saying that telling anyone how to feel was presumptious if not outright rude, and that all I was saying was “it hurts my heart to know that wonderful people would not be allowed to work there because they will not sign a statement of faith in Jesus. As if non-Christians are not capable of doing the job in an ethical, caring manner. That, to me, is very disappointing.”

Another poster added, “it saddens me to think that there are probably some extremely qualified, equally wonderful people who would be assets to *** and its families who won’t get that chance. And the families won’t get a chance to benefit from a truly diverse staff and their valuable perspectives.”

We both reiterated how appreciative we were of this agency that created our families, and how we still believe they are one of the best agencies in existence.

When suddenly, out of lurk-mode, a waiting parent sped by and shot this onto the board:

“it saddens me to think that there are probably some extremely qualified, equally wonderful people who would be assets to HEAVEN and the kingdom who won’t get that chance. And the kingdom family won’t get a chance to benefit from a truly diverse and valuable perspectives. There is only one way y’all. I pray for the salvation of every lost person.
In God’s love-
S*****
Christians-we can do more good praying then typing! Let’s commit to that, how about it?
Read Matt. 7:6 (ya know what i mean?)”

OUCH! That one stung. Several of us pointed out that comments like that are exactly what make non-Christians wary of anything that openly professes to be Christian. Nothing like being told your soul is lost. We also told her not to waste her prayers on heathens like us who don’t desire salvation.

I predict she will be another one whapping her son in the head one day for not believing in God. Oh, wait, it’s Jesus she’ll be ranting about. Sorry. Gotta keep the story straight. You have to excuse me, I’m still shaken from the impact.

Some people just don’t get it — that invading Iraq was a bad idea.  John McCain is one.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton is another one, though she does at least have a plan to end the occupation.

It really amazes me that such otherwise smart people still declare that invading Iraq was a good idea, given that all of the available, objective evidence demonstrates that it wasn’t.  Even a self-serving political agenda, which both of these people have, should not take a back seat to sound reasoning.

This one-minute video (which I found on Dispatches from the Culture Wars) raises dozens of questions (many of them having nothing to do with the subject being discussed between this mother and son). But this video also succinctly illustrates the way that mindless dogma can give wings to stupidity and cruelty.

Are all conversations between parents and children regarding religion like this? Absolutley not. On the other hand, I suspect that hundreds of conversations like this occur every day and, further, that it is against the attitude displayed by this “mom” that so many of us non-believers spend so much energy rebelling. If we could somehow remove God from the conversation, we could see this exchange for what it is, a foolish and grotesque abuse of power. Such a sad, powerful and disturbing image.

This video reminds me that maybe it’s not really religion against which so many of us non-believers rebel. Even though this attitude all too often goes under the name of religion. I say this because innumerable acts of kindness are also “committed” in the name of religion.

I can only hope that this mother someday learns to patiently listen to her child and to feel some empathy for his concerns. If she doesn’t, she’s going to run him off forever. If she hasn’t already.

I’ve taken something of an accidental hiatus from the blog the past few months. “Real life” responsibilities left me rather distracted, and without a word, I “disappeared” from the face of the earth, as far as everyone at Dangerous Intersection knew anyway. Or, in my view, Dangerous Intersection perhaps “disappeared” from my radar. Either way, a community of people with whom I had communicated, traded knowledge and ideas suddenly vanished from the world entirely, and I from it. Because DI does not occupy the real world in any tangible sense for me, when I neglected it, it nigh did cease to exist. And likewise, I did not exist to the people who have known me only through it.

This concept got me thinking about the expanse of telecommunications we have in our hands, and what it may mean for real human relationships. Can we define faraway, supposed acquaintances who can vanish from our knowledge at any time (as I did) as “friends”? And, as this post’s title muses, what happens to my online network of psuedobuddies when I leave, or die?

I don’t mean to downplay the potential of online communication. People made due for centuries maintaining meaningful relationships with mere pen-pals, using a far less forgiving medium and time-frame. I think of the letters exchanged between the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for years upon years, across many miles, maintaining a friendship and respect nearly across the grave, as it turned out. Thus it can clearly happen that long-distance, barely-seen friends can have an impact on one another and form a meaningful bond.

If anything, the internet has expanded that possibility and given us all more access to other people- their work, their photos, their hobbies (like blogging or photography), their fanatic rantings. The immediacy of modern communication can give us more and more intimate long-distance friends. So much so, that we may feel we actually know these people, these identities constructed by the very individual (think of flatteringly-altered photos, omitted details on profiles, and the like).

But perhaps the intimacy comes on too quickly, and without warrant. It appears that psychologically, a screen and a few hundred miles can make us all more forthcoming with out brand new “friends” online. When psychologists want to study touchy issues- like drug use or less-accepted sex practices- they favor computer-administered surveys over oral interviews or even paper questionnaires. Something about that screen makes us open up and feel comfortable enough to divulge the gory details of our lives, apparently.
(more…)