Have you ever noticed that certain people who drive Very Large Vehicles tend to drive slower than everyone else?  I followed a 4X4 pick-up truck of epic proportions this morning and the driver crawled along at just under 25 miles an hour on a 35 mph street.  He–there’s only one word for it–”sauntered” along, impressed by his own steel garb.  It was attention-getting and annoying.

The thing is, I’d wager that if you put him in a Toyota Celica, he’d bomb along at 40-plus.

People wear attitudes.  Ever noticed the personality change that takes place in an otherwise pleasant, excellently-mannered fellow who puts on his leathers and climbs onto his Harley?  This is not illusion.  There is a shift in attitude that comes with the whole aesthetic, and an aesthetic is what it is. 

In a deep way, we wear our attitudes and our ideologies.  The “traditional dress” of certain cultures come with changes in body language, posture, speech patterns, and attitudes toward others.  This is not all bad and I’m not suggesting it is, but…

I took you through the path of mild chuckles to bring you to my main point, which is a bit harder, but no less valid.

We hide within and behind our furnishings, by which I mean clothes, cars, houses, symbols.  From within them we face the world and deal with it accordingly.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, until we get to things like–

Terrorist suicide bombers.

I won’t drag this out.  Simply put, they couldn’t do that but for the baggy clothes, cloaks, djebbalyhs, and so forth that hide not only who they are but what they carry.  Want to end suicide bombings in Baghdad tomorrow?  No one is allowed on the street clothed.  Okay, maybe some briefs, bikini tops for the ladies.  You want to eliminate bombers on airlines?  Everyone flies naked.  Very difficult to smuggle something on board that way.

No uniforms would lead to a lack of ideological signs.  Who do you shoot?  Who do you hate?\

Furthermore, this could potentially lead to better health.  I mean, really.  There’s been discussion on Dangerous Intersection for a while now about health, fitness, losing weight, high heels, etc.  There are people with sound medical reasons for not getting “in shape” but for the rest, the best reason is that they can hide behind their clothes.  If there are going to be instances of socially mandated public nudity, I’d bet more of them would get serious about how their bodies look.

(This is insensitive, but I can’t help it.  One of the things that just blows my mind is seeing someone patently obese who obsesses over a chic hairstyle, as if that little bit of protein on the scalp when coifed can detract from the fact that the wearer would do much better to lose about a hundred pounds.  It is self-deceptive.  I’m being curmudgeonly, I know, but…)

Now, everyone has a right to be Who They Are.  This should not be compromised.  Cultural symbolism is very important in this respect.  Clothing and custom of different people’s should be respected.

But I think it would help the world if we stopped believing that we have to go with this all the time.  An hour or two a day when everyone has to drop all that and be just like everyone else would, I think, go a long way toward smothering the self-annointed who put such cultural standards ahead of everything else–including everyone else’s life.

We can now return to our regularly scheduled mundanity.

There may be little original in this post, but then, there seems to be little original in its subject.  It’s just that, well, no one, or not many, manage to say the obvious.

I was sitting before my tv the other day watching Dune.  The SciFi Channel version, not that monstrosity from David Lynch–of the two, the former is far superior, because you can actually follow the story without wincing at the acting.  Now, for those not familiar with it, Dune by Frank Herbert is a groundbreaking science fiction novel about a desert planet that contains in its substance “the greatest treasure of the universe”, the fictional Spice, a quasi-hallucinogenic morphogenetic substance without which travel in this universe is impossible and the Empire, such as it is, will cease to be.  Hmm.  Sounds metaphorical to me, how about you?  In any event, the planet, Dune, is peopled by a nomadic desert folk known as the Fremen, who, when roused, become the fanatical warriors for the messianic personality known as Muad’Dib.

As I’m watching, I listen to the second or third speech about how the Fremen have a prophecy about an off-world leader–the Mahdi–who will come to lead them against their enemies.  In the meantime, they collect water (a precious commodity) keep to themselves, and settle their differences among themselves with ritual combat and other related practices.  When questioned about this, the standard reply is “It’s our way.”

And it occurred to me that the function of the Mahdi–and all other Messiahs–is to serve as a catalyst for change, to do the things unthnkable within a society, to lever a people out of their traditions and set them to change. 

Something they could–and should–do for themselves.

Because none of these figures have ever done anything particularly special, other than to say what everyone–or at least many–are thinking but are too cowed by custom to say.

So they have prophecies about, essentially, some hapless goof who has the wisdom–or stupidity–to point out the exit from the temple and then have the audacity to tell everyone that they can leave.  For their moment of inspiration and trouble, they are usually killed–or coopted by the war faction to lead a jihad or something and do some killing, by which time a new order has taken root and customs are reestablished and immutable and the change brought by the messiah safely neutralized by all the bloodshed In The Name Of…

Custom can be a fine thing in its place, but when it chains people to misery and oppression because everyone is too afraid to point out the obvious, it becomes an abomination.  I’m watching Dune and thinking, “What the hell do you need a Mahdi for?  You have a pretty good idea already what needs to be done, why don’t you just go do it?”

In the case of Jesus, the Hebrews needed a Messiah to free them.  From what?  They could travel throughout the Roman Empire if they wanted (and had the money, something that was not a unique condition to them, having or not having).  In many ways, under Roman law, they were in fact freer than they had ever been under their own kings.  Free from the Roman heel?  Well, the pros and cons are arguable, but a close reading of the New Testament suggests that in order for them to change culturally to exist peacefully, they needed a symbolic sacrifice that fulfilled the law, freeing them from Old Testament legalities that hamstrung them.  They were likely never going to get their country back the way it had been and pining for it was inhibiting them from trying something new.  (I’m simplifying here to make a point.)  The messianic function Jesus performed was to tell them to, basically, get over themselves and start living a little.  They weren’t any better than Romans, Egyptians, Libyans, etc.  The thing they thought they had to have which put them at odds with Rome and made their lives miserable just wasn’t that important.  Love one another.

For this, he was killed.  (Actually, he was killed for other reasons, but if you go to Sunday School, this is what we’re told.)  And really, all these people already knew this.  They didn’t need a Messiah to tell them this.

But there seems to be a need for one idiot who will actually break the log jam and sort of grant permission for everyone to do the obvious.

The trouble with Mahdis and Messiahs is that those who follow them still don’t do the work.  They substitue allegiance for moral growth.  They hand responsibility over to the Leader instead of figuring out just what the change signified is all about.  And they end up building a new power structure around the Mahdi that is every bit as constraining as the one he’s supposedly freeing them from.

Of course, when you continue reading Herbert’s  Dune  novels, this is exactly the point he makes.

It’s not difficult to understand.  But damn, we still won’t wean ourselves off this whole Messiah idea.

You’ve got to read this description of the new American embassy under construction in Bagdad (the title: ”The Colossus of Bagdad”).  This monstrous construction project is unbelievably arrogant and excessive.  It will be the largest embassy on the planet.

As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole “hyperpower,” dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul—or a khan.

This is terrific writing characteristic of TomPaine.com.  But this is not just a story about a construction project.  Rather, it is a story of the corrupt leaders of our nation.  This story makes me acutely embarrassed to be an American.  No, I don’t want to leave the U.S.  I want to change it.

Why are CD sales down?  Rather than blaming piracy, this article in Business Week suggests that there are only so many hours in a day, and we are increasingly busy entertaining ourselves in ways other than listening to CDs:

There are only so many hours in a day for each of us — the consumers of entertainment — to consume entertainment. Various new forms of entertainment that catch on have to displace some of the time we spent on our former diversions.

While CD sales are down, the number of households with DVD players more than tripled over the past five years to 84 million and sales of DVDs rose to 1.1 billion from 313 million in 2001. Does anyone really think that consumers could buy 800 million more DVDs, worth $10 billion or more, without cutting back on some other entertainment spending? Similarly, the number of households with broadband Internet connections almost quadrupled to over 36 million. At $30 a month, that’s another $9 billion a year right there. The number of households with access to video on demand hit 24 million in 2005, ten times the 2001 level.

This article backs up its thesis with some interesting statistics regarding the way we’ve reallocated our entertainment hours over the past five years. 

Would someone please explain the following to me?  Bush and his Republican pals tell us that the reason they want to keep American troops in Iraq because they want to “fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,”  Where, exactly, is the logic in that statement?  How does having American troops on the Middle-East prevent a terrorist attack in North America?  How does it make U.S. borders more secure or American cities safer?  American troops in Baghdad can’t even secure Baghdad, what makes anyone think they are securing New York, Chicago and L.A.?

I just don’t see how keeping American troops in Iraq makes it any less likely that terrorists will attack America.  Don’t terrorists have plenty of ways to get into America without going through Iraq first?  Indeed, if a terrorist wanted to attack America, how likely do you suppose it is that he would go to Iraq in the first place?  Why not just go straight to the U.S.?

Please, the next time Bush or one of the 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls says he wants to keep American troops in Iraq because he wants to “fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,” ask him to explain how he thinks it will do so.

I’ve been spending (wa-ay too much) time today reading various news reports about the new Answers In Genesis Museum. In the blog responses to some of these reports I see mostly relief that someone has finally created this museum to tell the truth about Young Earth Creationism. As opposed to all those partisan Atheistic evolutionists who have infiltrated all the sciences. Did you know that the current estimate of the age of the Earth is an evolutionist assumption, not the continuously refined end result result of centuries of study in geology, astronomy, selenology, isotopes, meteorology, archeology, and (more recently) genetics?

They quote the AIG website as a prime source for rebuttals to thousand-time-tested scientific “theories”, and treat such a reputable source as Gospel.

They cite the mythical Colorado study that showed that a single flood could have deposited all the different, clearly defined, interlaced geologic layers. I say mythical because I have never found any source for this presumed experiment. No write-up. No description of the procedure. Nothing. If anyone can cite the actual study, the people involved, and the peer group that verified it, please educate me.

Anyway, my question to them is: Even if we assume this unlikely proof that multiple layers, repeatedly alternating between heavy and light materials, could have been deposited by a single flood event, what about the Iridium layer?

It is called the Iridium Layer because it is unusually rich in iridium, a very heavy element that is common in meteorites but rare in the crust of the Earth. This narrow band of sediment is found everywhere on Earth at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Triassic formations. This is pretty high up on the column of layers for such a heavy element. Every dating method (dozens of independent technologies) shows that this layer was deposited worldwide, simultaneously at a time between 60,000,000 and 70,000,000 years ago. But that’s not the point, here.

My point is, if all these layers were put down by a flood event, how could such a unique and narrow band exist? It falls between two other layers that are common types among the strata. A band like this does not show up in any of the other juxtapositions of these 2 types of layers, also presumably precipitated from the same flood. Just once, and made of material not usually found in erosion sediment.

Sure, if “a magic man done it” is your answer, that can’t be argued scientifically. But the new museum claims to use the process of science to prove its case. No observers who have seen the museum so far have noted any evidence of the scientific process there. Just scientific nomenclature and truly expert and convincing displays of conclusions drawn from … the Bible.

Aside: Observers have noted that, unlike all other museums outside of D.C, the guards at the AIG museum on opening weekend were armed and had bomb-sniffing attack dogs. It’s as though the fundamentalists were afraid that rationalists would use fundamentalist tactics (like clinic bombings) on this new type of religious venue. AIG has petitioned the county to give their security force complete police authority.

I didn’t think so. It’s a lot to ask of another human being.  Then again, if we were “lowly” army ants, we would readily serve as pothole plugs for each other.  According to Dr. Scott Powell:

Broadly, our research demonstrates that a simple but highly specialised behaviour performed by a minority of ant workers can improve the performance of the majority, resulting in a clear benefit for the society as a whole.

The imperative phrase is proclaimed on millions of bumper stickers: “Support the Troops.” 

Tell me what it means to “support the troops” and then I’ll tell you whether I support the troops.  Fair enough?  Until you can tell me what the phrase means, asking me whether I “support the troops” is like asking me to sign a blank check.  I don’t sign blank checks.

The vague phrase “Support the troops” is a challenge that is not only found on bumper stickers these days.  For instance, Bill Arkin of the Washington Post recently wrote about soldiers who are increasingly expressing frustration with the growing opposition to the war back home.  Many of the soldiers took it personally.  Arkin quotes Staff Sergeant Manuel Sahagun:

One thing I don’t like is when people back home say they support all troops, but they don’t support the war.  If they’re going to support us, support us all the way.

Arkin goes so far as to characterize the volunteer troops as “mercenaries,” suggesting that we’d be having an entirely different national discussion if we had a draft.  Arkin’s “mercenary” comment quickly caused a firestorm.  Overnight, his blog drew more than 900 comments. Arkin also drew the ire of conservatives from coast to coast.  Did he fail to “support the troops”?

“Support the troops” is a hopelessly vague phrase; it means different things to different people.  For instance, when I am asked whether I support the troops, it could mean any of the following things:

1. Do I “support the troops” in the sense that I generally support the war?

The biggest problem is that the troops are fighting the war; ultimately, the war is what the troops do. If there were no troops, there wouldn’t be a war.  Hence, I have sympathy with Sergeant Sahagun’s frustration.  How can we support the soldiers but not what the soldiers do?  The challenge of whether I support the troops does requires, then, that I consider what the Iraq war is all about. What is the war in Iraq about?  I don’t buy the Administration’s official line.   To the contrary, see this list from Iraq Veterans Against the War:

• The Iraq war is based on lies and deception.
• The Iraq war violates international law.
• Corporate profiteering is driving the war in Iraq.
• Overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq.
• Soldiers have the right to refuse illegal war.
• Service members are facing serious health consequences due to our Government’s negligence.
• The war in Iraq is tearing our families apart.
• The Iraq war is robbing us of funding sorely needed here at home.
• The war dehumanizes Iraqis and denies them their right to self-determination.
• Our military is being exhausted by repeated deployments, involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve and National Guard.

Do I hope for the safe return of the troops to their families?  Absolutely.  Do I support the troops insofar as they are fighting a war described by the items on the above list?  Not at all.

2. Do I “support the troops” in that I agree with everything the troops are doing. 

Sorry, but I can’t wholeheartedly “support” them in this way.  Innocent people (Iraqi civilians) are dying by the tens of thousands (or maybe the hundreds of thousands), often as a result of American bombs and bullets.  (more…)

Today’s meditation is brought to you by Gary Snyder, poet, Buddhist, environmentalist and former dharma bum. I hope you enjoy it!

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings–even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”

“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”

And he showed himself in his true form of

(more…)

Whether the topic is Iraq, religion, discrimination, or even the scientific theory of evolution, you can likely find a use for John B. S. Haldane’s description of the four stages of acceptance of ideas:

      i)    this is worthless nonsense;
      ii)   this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
      iii)  this is true, but quite unimportant;
      iv)   I always said so.

 From John B.S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics, #58, 1963, p.464.

Ebonmuse has raised an intriguing point at his site, Daylight Atheism.  He suggests that unrealistic expectations promulgated by many churches throw many people into disorienting existential spirals.  Instead of acknowledging the limitations of human animals up front, many church-goers (with the encouragement of their religious leaders), conceive of their journeys through life as a constant series of personal failures.  Unable to account for their inabilities to live up to unreasonable expectations, they become vulnerable to cults of forgiveness.

By imposing unrealistic, impossible-to-follow strictures on its followers, Christianity sets them up for failure. And when that failure inevitably happens, it produces guilt and shame among those followers, reinforcing the teaching that all human beings are incorrigible sinners and encouraging them to cling even harder to Christianity for salvation . . .

If . . . we try to deny human nature and suppress these instincts altogether, pressure builds up until they explode. This is what happened to [Ted] Haggard, just as it happened to many other famous fundamentalist hypocrites. But instead of taking the right lesson from this, Christianity assumes the answer is to try even harder next time. As part of this, many Christian groups attempt to take away people’s access to the information they need to make responsible decisions - abstinence-only sex education being a prime example - making the likelihood of a poor outcome even greater.

This is a very effective and insidious tactic. As I’ve written before, it’s like convincing people that they are sick in order to sell them the cure. But in this case, the cure makes you feel even sicker and sets up a vicious cycle of dependency. Taught by Christianity that they are sinners in need of forgiveness, believers perpetually return to Christianity for the forgiveness they believe only it can give them. Believers can become “addicted to forgiveness”. This is a very common theme in deconversion stories, where former Christians testify how their terror of damnation led them to repeatedly ask Jesus for salvation, out of fear that they hadn’t done it right the last time or had committed some grave sin since then. Religious authorities who promise forgiveness for a price are the pushers in this scheme, and like Haggard, some of them use their own product. (The price need not be monetary - it often includes contributing to a religious leader’s preferred political causes.) And over time, as with all drugs, the effectiveness of the forgiveness “drug” wanes, impelling believers to become even more rigid and dogmatic in their devotions to win the same feeling of relief.

I wholehearted agree with Ebonmuse on this point.  I can’t think of a better way to convince people to take on an unrealistic “solution” than to convince them that there is a fake “problem” in the first place (why am I thinking of Iraq?). 

What’s the “problem” sold by so many churches?  It’s that we are constantly screwing up. We are bad children, naughty children.  Those of us who are really bad must go to hell.  Most of us, though, can be reformed through those church-sanctioned Sunday morning “time-outs.” 

The key, though, is that we are defective semi-ethereal beings, rather than clever animals.   We are “failures,” not simply feeling our way though life by employing hit-and-miss heuristics.   We are “sinful,” thus requiring forgiveness by people and gods less defective than ourselves.  Many churches teach that ensouled being should strive for “perfection,” as though we aren’t comprised of (sophisticated) animal instincts.  The fact that churches convince us of an alleged battle between a body and a soul requires a spiritual prescription dispensed by a specially trained person of the cloth.  We are helpless to heal ourselves.  Even when we are healed, we are still sinful and, therefore, defective. 

If we could only get past this con job offered by many churches (that we are “bad”), we could start learning how to get along, rather than spending so much time and energy being competitively judgmental.   We could work together to seek a reasonable homeostasis for our vast human collective, rather than employing dysfunctional nomadic or Dark Ages techniques. We could start thinking in terms of ecology rather than morality.

I just laughed when I read this article about the new “all-you-can-eat” seats at Dodger Stadium.  For one price, fans get all the hotdogs, nachos, popcorn, peanuts and soda they can consume, and the fans are…sorry for the pun…eating it up.  One fan interviewed for the article (and I don’t imagine he’s the only one) likes to bet his buddies who can eat the most food.  I wonder what the “losers” must do for the “winner”…pay for his cardiac bypass surgery?

Dive in at Enchgallery.  You could spend quite a while at this site taking in the fractal sites.   Those fractals are common in nature, there is something other-worldly about these works of art.

I don’t know anything about bodybuilding, or I didn’t until I watched Raising the Bar 2, a brand-new documentary by Mike Pulcinella (Mike wrote it, shot and edited it).  Mike often submits comments to this site, and we have corresponded by e-mail a number of times.  A couple weeks ago, Mike asked me whether I’d be interested in watching his new documentary, and I jumped at the chance.  Based upon Mike’s many comments to this site, I know him to be a thoughtful guy. I knew that he must’ve found something worthy of his time in this freakish-seeming endeavor of “bodybuilding.” 

In this documentary, Mike follows his brother Dave Pulcinella (and Dave’s significant other, Jenn Emig) as Dave trains for and competes in high-level bodybuilding competitions.  Before you jump to the conclusion that this is just some guy following his brother around with the camera, take a look at the trailer for “Raising the Bar 2,” available at Mike’s site. As you will see, Mike is a skilled filmmaker and storyteller and he is careful to make sure that this story retains real-life texture.  Mike’s edits are crisp and the soundtrack works well.  As for the storytelling, this kind of video could only have been accomplished by a filmmaker who had gained the complete trust of the participants.  In sum, this documentary is not always a glowing endorsement of Dave.

The documentary was compelling on several levels.  First of all, viewers will have an opportunity to see what is really like to compete in the sport of bodybuilding.  Full disclosure: before I saw this film, I thought that this sport was freakish.  I still think the sport is freakish, although I have now been reminded that the participants are real human beings and they are not physically or emotionally homogenous.

The sport ostensibly involves bodies, of course, bodies as machines, but as Dave Pulcinella comments, “It’s always a mind game.”  How could it not be?  After all, while the competitors are working up to the actual competitions, they must repeatedly force-feed themselves enormous amounts of food–Dave jams down 18 chicken breasts each day, to go with apparently endless numbers of eggs.  Simply hauling home the food from the grocery store would seem sufficient to build up muscles.

So why do these people participate in the sport?  Maybe the answer can be found in a joke often told by bodybuilders:

Q: How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:  Three.  One to screw it in and two to say “Dude, you’re huge!”

The documentary moves us toward Dave’s participation in the Masters National Competition in Pittsburgh.  As you can imagine, there are ups and downs along the way.  Simply watching the workouts is exhausting.  What was surprising to me is that sculpting one’s body in such extreme ways requires a tremendous amount of planning and discipline.  It’s not like you can just go to the gym a few times a week.  (more…)

These stats are mind-boggling.  The U.S. is not a good place to have access to a fast or reasonably priced Internet connection:

The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.

CWA President Larry Cohen testified before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, in support of a discussion draft of the Broadband Census of America Act.

“Good data is the foundation of good policy,” Cohen said. “We desperately need a national Internet policy to reverse the fact that our nation – the country that invented the Internet – has fallen to 16th in the world in broadband adoption.”

“Equally disturbing, Americans pay more for slower connection speeds than people in many other countries,” he added.

According to statistics provided by CWA 80 percent of households in Japan can connect to a fiber network at a speed of 100 megabits per second. This is 30 times the average speed of a US cable modem or DSL connection, at roughly the same cost.

Cohen pointed out that the average upload speed was in the US was only 371 kilobits per second, not nearly enough to send quality medical information over the Internet.

What should we do about this broadband problem in the U.S.”  Consider the solutions offered in this well-reasoned article by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance:  “Localizing the Internet:  Five Ways Public Ownership Solves the U.S. Broadband Problem.”  Here are the basic points the long article makes:

1. High-speed information networks are essential public infrastructure.
2. Public ownership ensures competition.
3. Publicly owned networks can generate significant revenue.
4. Public ownership can ensure universal access and
5. Public ownership can ensure non-discriminatory networks [this refers to net neutrality].

Huffpo is reporting what secret papers revealed to Bush before he decided to invade Iraq. 

Intelligence analysts predicted, in secret papers circulated within the government before the Iraq invasion, that al-Qaida would see U.S. military action as an opportunity to increase its operations and that Iran would try to shape a post-Saddam Iraq.

The top analysts in government also said that establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a “long, difficult and probably turbulent process.” Democrats said the newly declassified documents, part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released Friday, make clear that the Bush administration was warned about the very challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

The question, then, is this:  What if W, Dick, Dick, Colin and Condelezza had made public what U.S. analysts had told them prior to the invasion?  BTW, the conclusions of this “secret” report all seem self-evident. 

My conclusion, then, is that revealing these papers would have seemed credible (if not obvious) pre-invasion and they would have resulted in serious dialogue in the media and Congress prior to the invasion. 

Congressional weasels…er, I mean Democrats…voted this week to ’stay the course’ in Iraq, despite the fact that many were elected on promises to bring American troops home.  Instead, many caved in to the Republican motto that “support American troops” means “keep them in Iraq.”  Yes, the same Republican party that calls political repression the “Patriot” Act, that dismantled air pollution regulations in their “Clean Air” Act, and whose “war on terrorism” has created more terrorists than the human race has ever seen, is now telling us that keeping our troops in Iraq is the way to show them our support.  And, once again, Democrats are going along with this nonsense. 

They should all be thrown out of office for their complicity in killing American troops.

Chris Hedges’ opening statement in his debate with Sam Harris on “Religion, Politics and the End of the World” has been posted at Truthdig.com. Harris’ reply and a recording of the debate should be available soon.

Some of you may remember Hedges’ graduation speech at Rockwell College in 2003, where he was booed and heckled for daring to suggest that the war in Iraq was anything but a noble venture. Since then he has written “American Fascists” about the Religious Right. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his coverage of global terrorism, and is also the recipient of a Amnesty International award for human rights journalism.In his statement, Hedges offers a strong defense of the religious impulse, while at the same time condemning most forms of institutionalized religion.

God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty. To argue about whether God exists or does not exist is futile. The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence. God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness. God is perhaps best understood as our ultimate concern, that in which we should place our highest hopes, confidence and trust.
In Exodus God says, by way of identification, “I am that I am.” It is probably more accurately translated: “I will be what I will be.” God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence. The name of God is laden, thanks to our religious institutions and the numerous tyrants, charlatans and demagogues these institutions produced, with so much baggage and imagery that it is hard for us to see the intent behind the concept. All societies and cultures have struggled to give words to describe these forces.

—–

The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions—indeed within any institutions—for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority.

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If civil or religious authority enforces an iron and self-righteous conformity among members of a community, then faith loses its uncertainty, and the element of risk is removed from acts of faith. Faith is then transformed into ideology. Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess. They ossify the message. And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith. The more vast the gap between professed faith and acts of faith, the more vast our delusions about our own grandeur and importance, the more intolerant, aggressive and dangerous we become.

Nothing new in that, though no doubt the distinction will be lost on many Harrisites, and he will be attacked as an apologist for religion.

I was more interested in the parts where Hedges touches on Harris’ dangerous demagoguery regarding the war on terror:

“We are at war with Islam,” Harris writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet” (P. 110).

He assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred” (P. 31 ), that “the problem is with Islam itself” (P. 28). He writes that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death” (P. 123).

Now after studying 600 hours of Arabic, spending seven years of my life in the Middle East, most of that time as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, I do not claim to be a scholar on Islam. But I do know the Koran is emphatic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs and unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. The Koran states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. More important, the tactic of suicide bombing was pioneered as a weapon of choice by the Tamils, who are chiefly Hindu, in Sri Lanka long before it was adopted by Hezbollah, al-Qaida or Hamas. It is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror.

Harris claims to be an expert on Islam because he has read the Koran and Hadith in translation. Whereas Hedges has actually spent time in the Islamic countries and interviewed countless Muslims of all political and religious stripes:

I know that Muslim societies are shaped far more by national characteristics—an Iraqi has a culture and outlook on life that are quite different from an Indonesian’s—just as a French citizen, although a Catholic, is influenced far more by the traits of his culture. Islam has within it tiny, marginal groups that worship death, but nearly all suicide bombers come from one language group within the Muslim world, Arabic, which represents only 20 percent of Muslims. I have seen the bodies—including the bodies of children—left in the wake of a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. But I have also seen the frail, thin bodies of boys shot to death for sport by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Tell me the moral difference. I fail to see one, especially as a father.

Hedges correctly locates the impetus behind atrocities throughout the ages in the externalization of evil, the binary separation of good and evil, us and them, which denies the moral intuition that the dividing line behind good and evil goes down the middle of everyone of us:

This is the greatest failing of Sam’s book. He externalizes evil. And when you externalize evil, all tools, including violence and torture, become legitimate to eradicate an evil that is outside of you. This worldview—one also adopted by the Christian right—is dangerous, for if we fail to acknowledge our own capacity for evil it will grow unchecked and unheeded…

This externalization of evil is what allows Sam to endorse torture. He, of course, deludes himself into believing that it is reason that requires us to waterboard detainees in the physical and moral black holes we have set up to make them disappear. He quotes Alan Dershowitz, not only to reassure us that the Israelis treat Palestinians—400 of whom they have killed in Gaza over the past few months—humanely, but to trot out the absurd notion of a ticking time bomb, the idea that we know a terrorist has planted a large bomb in the center of the city and we must torture him, or in the glib phrase of Harris, we must dust off “a strappado” and expose “this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times” (P. 193).

I guess this reference to torture is amusing if you have spent your life encased in the protected world of the university. As someone who was captured and held for over a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the 1991 Shiite uprising in Basra and then turned over for my final 24 hours to the Iraqi secret police—who my captors openly expected to execute me—I find this glib talk of physical abuse repugnant. Dershowitz and Harris cannot give us a legal or historical precedent where such a case as they describe actually happened. But this is not the point; the point is to endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness.

That sound is me cheering.

Hedges makes a final jab at Harris for his “Buddhism Lite” and New Agey musings in “The End of Faith,” as indeed many others have done. I too find it pretty amazing that Harris spent 9 years (!) studying Buddhist meditation in the Theravedan tradition. Yet he still seems to see meditation mainly as a personality enhancement tool and a vehicle for narcissistic experiences of transcendence, rather than a radical way of liberation and compassion to realize the end of suffering.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing Sam Harris’ response.

Meanwhile, if all the talk of religiously-motivated violence depresses you, I highly recommend that you see the movie Only Human, if you can find it in your local video store.

Interesting article from Salon.com.  The bottom line is that you’re not going to find a lot of the kind of meat you’d buy for your own consumption at a grocery store.   Yes, there is a reason that you can get a huge bag of dog food for not a lot of money:

Traditionally, much of the protein in pet food comes from animal byproducts. The pet food industry nicely parallels the human agricultural industry, providing a convenient way for food producers to use up the spleens and bones and chicken feet that American consumers don’t have the palate for. Even diseased and dying animals are allowed in pet food, as long as they’re processed in such a way to destroy any microorganisms, Syverson says. All of those myriad pieces and parts end up as appetizing ingredients like “poultry byproduct meal,” “meat-and-bone meal,” and “animal digests.”

Pet food is also a handy way for meat processors to get rid of brains and spines from cows and sheep — the parts with a high risk of housing prions, the rogue proteins that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. While such parts are banned from human foods and from animal feed intended for cows and other ruminants, they’re A-OK for the family pet . . .

The good news for pets and owners is that animal byproducts in pet food may not be as gruesome as feared. For years the pet food industry has been, well, dogged by persistent rumors that meat from horses and from euthanized cats and dogs finds its way into pet food. “They do not use horse meat,” Ekedahl says, and “as a condition of membership, [Pet Food Institute members] affirm that none of their rendered material will contain cats and dogs. The public just wouldn’t stand for it.”

So we’re probably not feeding cats and dogs to our cats and dogs. Of course, a quick glance at the ingredient lists of that Dog Chow (and most other major brands) reveals that much of the protein doesn’t come from animals at all. “Glutens and soybeans and rice protein concentrate — those are cheap substitutes for real meat,” Hofve says.

It’s not as bad as I thought, but it reminds me of those gruesome songs some of us sang as kids.

We like to think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as days when young children give lots of hugs to their loving parents.  We don’t like to consider that these days are also days when thousands of innocent children are beaten by their parents, their anguished cries often not heard outside of their dysfunctional homes.  Saddest of all, these children are condemned to be beaten and screamed at by the people they trust most. 

In 1988, I was waiting for an elevator at the State office building where I worked as an Assistant Attorney General. Many social workers had their offices in the same building, and several of those social workers were also waiting for an elevator.

All of a sudden, a middle-aged man started yelling at a three-year-old boy, who started crying.  The boy weighed about 40 pounds.  The man quickly got angrier and started smacking the boy violently with the palm of his hand-maybe it was his fist.  Whump! Whump! Whump!   The little boy was now breathless and whimpering.  Like the other half-dozen people waiting for an elevator, however, I did nothing but stand there horrified.  The man cocked his arm back to strike the boy yet again when one of the social workers jumped forward and yelled at the man: “Stop hitting that child!”

With that, the man looked confused, then angry, then more confused, then meek.  The social worker further instructed him: “follow me.” The man followed the social worker, presumably to the social worker’s office.  It did not appear that the social worker knew this man.  This social worker, now a hero in my mind, stepped forward because it was the right thing to do.  He intervened because there was a child being mistreated.  It was that simple.

I am not proud of the fact that I stood there doing nothing while the man repeatedly struck the fragile little boy.  There was a window of 15 to 20 seconds during which I could’ve simply stepped up and told the man to stop.  Why not?  What did I have to lose by trying? 

I was not the first person to freeze when I was uncertain of what to do.  As Robert Cialdini writes in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984), whenever we are unsure of ourselves, “when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.. . . especially in an ambiguous situation, the tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing can lead to a fascinating phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance. [This phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance explains] the failure of entire groups of bystanders to aid victims in agonizing need of help.” 

(Page 129)  The classic case of this was the homicide of Catherine Genovese, who died in Queens, New York City, when at least a dozen people failed to pick up their phones to call the police, even though they heard the awful and unmistakable sounds of Ms. Genovese being viciously attacked.  Cialdini explains this phenomenon further:

In times of uncertainty, the natural tendency is to look around at the actions of others for clues.  We can learn, from the way the other witnesses are reacting, whether the event is or is not an emergency.  What is easy to forget, though, is that everyone else observing the event is likely to be looking for social evidence, too.  And because we all prefer to appear poised and unflustered among others, we are likely to search for that evidence placidly, with brief camouflaged glances at those around us.  Therefore everyone is likely to see everyone else looking unruffled and failing to act.  As a result, and by the principle of social proof, the event will be roundly interpreted as a non-emergency . . . the fascinating upshot [of this phenomenon is that] the idea of “safety in numbers” may often be completely wrong.

While Cialdini’s book might explain my inaction, it does not excuse it.  My shame in not acting on that occasion has provoked me to speak up during a subsequent similar situation.  But speaking up does not necessarily solve any child-abuse problems.  Speaking up might only embarrass and frustrate the parent in public.  Who is to say that that an attempt at intervention won’t provoke that parent to simply go home where he or she will secretly beat the holy crap out of their child?

I recalled my own inaction when I recently heard of another child abuse incident through two friends of mine.  They were on public transportation when they heard a mother start screaming at a tiny child and beating him.  Not entirely certain of what to do, my friends turned around and glared at the woman, only to see that she had other small children in her care in addition to the small child she was attacking.  One of my friends looked straight at the woman and told her “you need to go to parenting classes.”  Predictably, this did not provoke goodwill on behalf of the woman.  In fact, it caused her to glare back at my friends.  As she left the train, my friends feared that the mother was going home where she could privately inflict more damage on her children.

Child abusers are cowards.  Through their actions, they claim that they have rights to beat and scream at children simply because they are the parents. Unfortunately, the courts show great deference to violent people just because the little people the adults are punching kicking and demeaning are their own children.  At Court, then, child abusers hide behind tiny human shields. “Judge, you wouldn’t want to break up our family, would you?” (more…)

I was drilling titanium in my basement when my wife called me up to see what the grackles in our sycamore were complaining about. I barely had time to grab my camera and get a snapshot before he gave up on his latest kill, a pigeon lying in the street. After he flew the proverbial coop, I bagged and disposed of the abandoned meal. Hopefully the hawk (my snapshot below) has learned not to drop his kills in the street.

Since the hawk population down here in the city has risen, I see fewer pigeons, and more doves and gold-finches.

I’m a big believer in benign environmental management. Our lily pond is clear because I leave it alone to reach a balance, not because I use a dozen products to try to match some particular theoretical water quality profile. My way, we have dragonflies. Their ravenous larvae greatly reduce our mosquito population, before they take wing. The bats help with the adult mosquitoes, and are fun to watch at night.

We also have a yard cat that largely keeps the squirrels away from our produce, and teaches the birds caution. He generally eats what he kills. There is some collateral damage. Sometimes he gets a koi snack. But the surviving fish are that much harder to catch.

I just hope that the bird flu doesn’t preferentially decimate the raptors, when (not if) it sweeps this way. Hawks and eagles are nice to have around.

Just wanted to pass along this link to an article by one of favorite columnists.  He goes over the edge some days, but most of the time he is spot on in his rantings!

Enjoy -

Have you ever wondered why humans must eat fruit to stay alive, but dogs, cats, cows, squirrels and other mammals don’t?  It’s because all mammals need Vitamin C to survive, but simians (including humans) are among the very few mammals that cannot synthesize Vitamin C from their diets.  Why?  Because humans (along with other apes, monkeys, guinea pigs, fruit-eating bats, and a few other species), carry a genetic defect that disrupts the Vitamin C production process.

Here’s the interesting part.  The vast majority of animals and plants are able to synthesize their own Vitamin C through a sequence of four enzyme-driven steps, which convert glucose to Vitamin C.  Human metabolism can, and does, perform the first three of these steps, but we have lost the ability to perform the fourth, because our gene that would produce the required fourth enzyme contains a defect and no longer functions.  Consequently, we cannot use the resulting proteins to synthesize Vitamin C:  our bodies break the proteins back down and reabsorb them.

Why is this important?  Well, the Bible tells us that the Garden of Eden contained fruit trees.  Fruit trees would have been unnecessary if God had created Adam with a properly functioning gene to synthesize Vitamin C.  Why did God not give Adam (whom God supposedly created in His own image) the properly functioning gene that He gave to virtually all other mammals?  Also, why did God give Adam the genes for the other three enzyme-driven steps, even though they would be useless without the fourth?  Doesn’t it seem…un-godlike…for an infallible God to have designed a “perfect” human who not only had a defective, non-functional gene, but also several functioning, useless ones?

Of course, evolutionary theory easily explains this phenomenon:  millions of years ago, our ancestors once had four working genes, but a genetic mutation occurred sometime in our lineage that has been passed down through the subsequent generations.  Fortunately for our ancestors (and us), this mutation was not fatal, because our ancestors were able to get Vitamin C from their diet, as we still must do today.  True, fruit is not our only source of Vitamin C, but our rare inability to synthesize Vitamin C makes me wonder where the supporters of so-called “intelligent design” get their absurd belief that our design is intelligent, especially when their own holy book suggests that their infallible god created us, from the beginning, with a very obvious genetic defect.

Michelle Obama, wife of Barack Obama, was recently interviewed by ABC News.  She presented Iraq as a domestic issue:

“All of our emotional and financial resources… as a country have been totally put into the war. We haven’t talked about the domestic issue in about 10 years,” she said. “There are no serious conversations about health care or education, or child care, or minimum wage. I mean, these are the basic issues that eat away at the family structure. So you can’t just tell, you know, a family of four to suck it up and make it work.”

“I think that we as a country have been a little lax in… our concern for these issues,” she said. “We’ve been nullified by the fear mongers, you know? It’s almost as if people have voted against their best personal issue interests because they’ve been so afraid of what could happen. You know, the terrorists are gonna get us.”

“[Terrorism is] an incredibly important concern, but where is the balance, you know… is really the question — where is the balance?” she continued. “You have to be a respected player. You have to do a little bit of both. So that nonideological, a nonfear-based approach is really what we need now as a country.”

I agree with Ms. Obama’s assessment.  Iraq is a domestic issue.  Terrorism is always a domestic issue.  This is true because dollars and hours are fungible.  

Pleassssse, somebody.  Wake me up.  I thought we were all done with Princess Diana.  But we’re not, because this is the 10th year anniversary of her death.  In other words, it’s a terrific opportunity to dust her off and to put her back up on the pedestal so that we can envy her, admire her for her so-called accomplishments and (most of all) become entranced with her image.

While waiting at a pharmacy, I leafed through the June 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine because Princess Diana’s photo is boldly featured on the front cover.  As I picked it up, I thought “Not again . . .”  This issue of Good Housekeeping also features a hagiography (what else was ever written about Princess Diana?) The reappearance of Diana aggravated me enough that I’m now sitting down to aggravate you with this rant.

The article describes Diana as “young, luminous and full of promise.”  We are told that “she was worried about doing the right thing.”  In fact, she was “saintly and endlessly giving.” I have heard it all before, though, and I’ve never been impressed with these sorts of accolades.  After all, Diana lived a plush life of glitz.  She mingled with her favorite musicians (such as Elton John) and she made unending appearances at fancy dinner parties where she wore her fancy gowns and smiled her fancy smile.  She “passionately followed music theatre and ballet.”

That’s what this article tells me, anyway.  It also tells me that she was “a good friend” to some people.  Talk about a low bar.  Truly, she was born into the British aristocracy and had the good life handed to her on a silver platter.  At a minimum, she should have at least been able to enjoy the arts and not piss off everybody.  Isn’t that what we would expect of anyone who had everything handed to them, that they would at least do something for the world? 

Shouldn’t rich and famous people of leisure be lending their names and images to worthy causes? Diana’s causes were ridding the world of landmines and working against discrimination of AIDS patients.  These aren’t bad things, of course, but you have to ask yourself what would people would have thought of her had she (again, a person of great wealth and leisure) not lent her name and image to some worthy causes?   Further, doing a bit of charity is a relatively cheap Machiavellian maneuver for portraying that one has “character,” especially anyone willing to present herself as a “Princess.”

Diana’s shtick worked impressively.  In the weeks following her death, more words were written about Diana (and her so-called accomplishments) than could ever be read by any human being in a lifetime.  It was truly an unimaginable quantity of material, and almost all of it was motivated by something other than real world assessment.  As I read some of it, I couldn’t help but think that there were thousands of people of real character in every major city who have worked hard to really make something of themselves despite insurmountable odds.  There are real people who have poured their energies back into their communities, where their tortured upbringings would suggest that we had no right to expect such generosity.

Diana died on August 31, 1997.  The frenzied media ran out of superlatives to describe Diana’s great accomplishments after they reached “saint.”  It was with some schadenfreude, then, that I contemplated the September 5, 1997 death of Mother Teresa.  After all, if Princess Diana was a “saint,” what was Mother Teresa?  With Mother Teresa’s death only one week after Diana’s, the media was exposed.  It had not really been reporting the news.  It was merely manipulating its readers to sell ads.  Further, Diane, and especially dead Diana, served as an excuse for a social lek.  To a large extent, Diana was not really about Diana.  (more…)