There are lots of reasons for you to be commuting by bicycle, but many of you who could cycle to work are still burning expensive gasoline to get there.  What’s it going to take to get you out of that expensive car and onto a high-precision, environment-friendly, health-enhancing bicycle?  How about some money?  Not just gas money, either. Read on.  This post might change your life in a dozen healthy and bank-account enhancing ways. 

More than half of Americans live less than 5 miles from the place where they work. That’s easy striking range for a bicycle.  Studies have shown that trips of less than 3 miles are often quicker by bike, and urban trips of 5 to 7 miles usually take about the same time.  Here are more statistics to consider:

According to the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, 25 percent of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40 percent of all trips are within two miles of the home, and 50 percent of the working population commutes five miles or less to work. Yet more than 82 percent of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle.

I’m one of the many people who live about five-miles from my place of employment.  Traveling five miles to work takes me only about 25 minutes.  This is only about 10 minutes more than it would take to drive to work in good traffic. 

I have commuted to work by bicycle since 1998.  Making the change from car to bike seemed so difficult and intimidating, until I made the change.  Looking back, I wonder why it seemed like such a difficult decision. 

[My trusty Trek 7900.  I purchased it 5 years ago for $500] 

I admit that cycling to work is not for everyone. Many people live long distances from their place of work.  Many people need to transport several children or heavy equipment every morning and evening.  Some people really do have physical limitations that make bicycle commuting impossible.  But chances are that many of you who are reading this don’t fall into any of these categories.

Many millions of Americans are terrific candidates for bicycle commuting.  Some of you can even combine use of a bicycle with public transportation, stretching your transportation access across your city.  Where I live, for example (in St. Louis, Missouri), you can roll your bicycle onto a light rail train or place it on a rack in the front of a public bus.  This has allowed me to quickly “bicycle commute” to places 10 or 15-miles away from my home. 

I’ve tried to anticipate many excuses for not cycling to work.  People who having tried bicycle commuting yet will resist the thought.   Many of you just don’t want to consider this healthy and cost-saving change.  Why?  Because it’s a change . . .  Check out these lists of responses to the most common excuses for not commuting by bicycle, here and here As you can see, they’ve anticipated your main concerns.  BTW, there are TONS of good bicycle websites out there.  You have no excuse for lacking information on how to buy a bike, how to repair it and how to enjoy it.

I started commuting by bicycle because I was compelled to work especially long stressful hours for several months straight.  After several weeks of this crushing work, it became apparent that I was not getting enough exercise and that I was feeling over-anxious while sitting at my desk.  I decided to run an experiment one morning: I hopped on my bicycle and rode to work for the first time. It felt a little strange and I felt out of place rolling up to my office building on a bicycle—it even felt a bit embarrassing.  After all, this is not how most people who work in office buildings get to work. Not in a conservative city of the American Mid-West, anyway.  I quickly got used to this change, though. I have been commuting by bicycle ever since.  In fact, when I die, they will have trouble prying my handlebars from my cold dead fingers.

Statistics show that only 2% of Americans take the opportunity to commute by bicycle.  Here’s another interesting bicycle statistic: Nineteen percent of those who rode their bicycles to work reported that their commute was the most pleasant activity of their day. In contrast, only two percent of workers who drove to work liked that part of their day. The advantages to commuting by bicycle are numerous.  The exercise of cycling to work lowers your stress level at work.  You will find that you no longer need to make time to exercise, because you will be building your exercise into your day, making exercise a natural and sustainable part of your life. 

Oh, yes. I promised to tell you how to make money by commuting on a bicycle . . . (more…)

Freethinkers, in their attempts to cast light on culture’s many logical foibles, can lose focus. Like the more traditional naysayers, who bemoan our times while looking foggily to those good-old-days that never existed, liberal critical thinkers can come to a similarly deluded doom-and-gloom conclusion. Of course, the evidence used by both camps differ completely- people like us at DI don’t mourn the decay of some imaginary moral backbone, but instead the rotting of clear-thinking minds.

It can seem at times that only the present U.S. suffers from ignorance, sloppy logic and woeful gullibility. This probably comes from our own faulty thinking- the availability heuristic at work. We see neighbors and coworkers buying into bogus alternative medicines and celebrity gossip, and the U.S. seems doomed to crumble into total sensationalism or idiocy. As if silly, baseless thoughts flourish only in the cultural Petri dish we have created.

But humans think silly, baseless things everywhere. Take the South Korean fear of “fan death” for example. As recently reported on Public Radio International’s program The World, many South Koreans believe in a unique urban legend that claims if you sleep with a fan running in a room with closed windows and doors, you die. No explanation why, mind you- it just happens. This zany, senseless belief apparently has had a profound impact on South Korean culture- every fan in the country supposedly comes equipped with a timer to prevent a deadly fan death disaster. South Korean researchers have even devoted studies to debunking the pervasive myth. Yet despite the evidence, the fear carries on successfully, and the superstition just won’t shake free from the minds of the people. That sounds almost American, doesn’t it?

The South Korean “fan death” urban legend reminds me that we cannot place all the blame for stupid people and idiotic thoughts on the media, the education system, religion, or the American culture at large. Sloppy logic appears in any group of human animals, and our species will likely always struggle with this aspect of human nature.

Who are “they”?  Well, high-level Pentagon officials, who are imposing fundamentalist Christianity on our soldiers.   The following excerpt is from a report by Truthout.org:

On the heels of a scathing report issued by the Defense Department’s inspector general that took high-level Pentagon officials to task for allowing an evangelical Christian organization unfettered access to the Department of Defense (DOD) to promote its fundamentalist agenda, comes word the Pentagon’s top chaplain opened its doors yet again to another evangelical group whose leader recently spent two days at the facility proselytizing, passing out Christian literature, and “saving souls.” . . .

According to documents obtained by the watchdog group the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and made available to Truthout, David Kistler, President of Hickory, North Carolina-based H.O.P.E. Ministries International, embarked on a “DC Crusade” along with dozens of members of the evangelical organization for two weeks that included two days inside the Pentagon proselytizing and preaching the “gospel” to government employees and “saving souls.”

Kistler is a somewhat controversial figure whose sermons contain apocalyptic messages and bizarre prophecies. He believes certain Democratic lawmakers will burn in hell while “good Christians,” such as President Bush, will be swept up into the heavens. The Rapture will soon vacuum up good Christians, including George W. Bush, to Heaven, he said in a past sermon to his congregation. Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton will not be Raptured up to Heaven. Following The Rapture, the Anti-Christ will appear and children will be “micro-chipped.”

Well, a little religion never hurt anyone, right?  Even while working at the Pentagon.  Maybe, then, it’s time to tell those dissenting soldiers to shut up worship Jesus Christ. (more…)

All summer, Bush has been insisting that we wait for official government reports on Iraq before we judge whether his surge strategy has worked or failed. Well, the GAO is reportedly on track to “conclude that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks set to judge the Iraqi government’s performance in the political and security arenas haven’t been met.”  And what is Bush’s response?  To acknowledge that his strategy is failing?  To admit that his leadership is deficient?  To take responsibility for failure?  Of course not.  According to the Bush Administration, the problem is that the benchmarks are too hard, and that they only measure whether or not requirements are met, not whether ”progress” has been made. 

No wonder Bush never liked going to school.  Teachers might acknowledge progress, but they give grades for success or failure, and that’s just something a perennial failure like Bush doesn’t enjoy. 

And have you noticed where else the Bush Administration has been laying blame for the failure to meet benchmarks?  On the Iraqi government, of course.  Yes, says Bush, the fault lies with the Iraqi government and with the benchmarks themselves, certainly not with the White House imbecile and his Republican cronies who set the whole mess into motion and who have mismanaged the operation every step of the way. 

All of which makes me wonder how much closer we and the Iraqi’s might be to meeting the benchmarks if Bush would put the blame where it belongs, and make the sorts of changes that genuine personal responsibility might foster.  The worst thing about failure often isn’t the failure itself; it’s the scapegoating by inept leaders who are content to prolong other peoples’ agony to protect their own egos.

Dedicated to the exploits and not-so-earnest protestations of Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, the cartoonists are having a field day. 

What happens when you forget to mention something important to your spouse? When you are running late or distracted, for any number of reasons? Bills get paid late because you forgot to ask him to mail them, Johnny misses soccer practice because you forgot to tell Dad he needed to be there by 5, nothing is thawed to cook for dinner because you meant to ask him to pick something up on the way home, the transmission in the car drops a gear because, well, damn, you keep forgetting to mention that noise. He heard it a couple of weeks ago, shouldn’t he have remembered? He knows Johnny has soccer practice on Tuesdays; is it your fault they changed the time?? Is it your fault the online bill-paying system was down so you decided to write checks and pay the old-fashioned way instead?

So Johnny grouses around and you have to go grovel to the coach on his behalf. You pay the late fees on the bills and have to forego til next month that great new bag you’ve been coveting. You and he are forced to carpool til the transmission is fixed, and yes, that one you’ll have to pay for. And that supper you put together after foraging through the pantry and fridge wasn’t half-bad after all. Mistakes. We all make them. We fuss at each other about them, we try not to make the same ones over and over, but they are a regular part of life, our daily learning experiences, the gravel crunching under our spinning wheels as we move from today into tomorrow.

A few days ago, a young couple here in St. Louis had one of those mornings. She is a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital, one of the best pediatric hospitals in the nation. He is a medical researcher for Washington University, housed just down the street from his wife’s workplace. They live in a tidy suburb on the inner ring and have a 5-year-old son. He welcomed his baby sister into the family late last winter. But this particular morning, St. Louis was anything but winter. We were suffering from a particularly bad case of “dog days,” with temperatures hovering near 100. The pediatrician was running late for a morning meeting. Normally, she’d take her daughter to the hospital’s day care before parking her car, but she was cutting it too close this day so she called her husband, already at work, and asked if he’d meet her so she could run into the meeting. He agreed, walked down and met her outside, drove her to her door and parked the car. Outside. In a parking lot, in the sun. He assumed his wife had already dropped their daughter off. She was sleeping quietly in her rear-facing carseat. Mom didn’t mention daycare drop-off specifically, assuming, well, that he would just KNOW. Or she didn’t mention it because she was distracted by trying to make sure she had everything together for her meeting. Or she was thinking about her sweet daughter snuggled back there and wishing she could hug her one more time before heading to work, and didn’t mention it because crying before a meeting was just silly. Or any number of a million different thoughts could have been running through her head. She trusted her husband to do what needed to be done, because he always did. He trusted her to have dropped off their daughter because, like I mentioned, she always did. And the sleeping, rear-facing baby didn’t make a sound.

By the time she was noticed by passers-by who broke out the car window and called 911, the temperature inside the car was nearing 140 degrees and 7-month-old baby Sophia was already dead. Both parents thought she was safely in daycare, delivered by the other. Neither felt any cause to worry or check. The daycare didn’t call when she didn’t arrive, because it is a hospital daycare. People work crazy shifts, changing shifts, in hospitals. It is, by all accounts, a wonderful facility.
The parents are, as few of us can imagine, devastated. Tormented by their miscommunication, distraught, and, I have no doubt, being eaten alive by their guilt. Unless one has lost a child, I don’t imagine one can fathom the depth of that pain. And to feel completely responsible for the avoidable death of your own child? This I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around. The parents have, not surprisingly, cooperated with authorities. The circuit attorney is reviewing the facts to determine if neglect or endangerment charges will be filed.

After reading the most recent article about this story on our newspaper’s website, I read a few of the readers’ postings following the article. I was, admittedly, expecting to see a few random ugly comments - those ‘blogs always seem to attract people with little more to do than slam others. But I was startled by the number of cringingly judgmental postings criticizing these people, insisting they are obviously too busy to have children, they should decide - career or family - obviously they can’t do both. “I would NEVER forget my child in the car . . . perhaps I was just obsessively careful with my own baby.” On and on the comments went, insisting they were bad parents, neglectful people, too busy to raise a family the “right” way. Couldn’t that be said for many of us - isn’t our entire culture too busy, often superficially so? These comments were, in my mind, heartlessly cruel.

Half of them had the facts wrong, with the mother leaving the baby in the car so the father could pick her up, etc. One likened her to another recent set of heat-related deaths, in which a mother intentionally left her children in the car with a bit of juice and water so that she could go to work when she couldn’t find child care. Both toddlers, both died. Tragic, too, but how does one become an adult, a job-holding adult, in this day and age and not realize that eight hours in a car in the summer is deadly? Not to mention all the other things wrong with leaving two toddlers alone for that long, even in cool temperatures. But since this particular woman was black and poor and the mom in question here is a white professional, it quickly spiraled down into a racial/class-ist issue, as if somehow these parents might be excused because of their race and their station in life.

No one seemed willing to consider intent. Few seemed willing to acknowledge that we all make mistakes. Am I the only one who’s heard a story about a baby being left behind when the whole family headed out on an outing? I remember a dear friend telling this story on her parents - middle-class suburban parents with four young daughters and a baby son. Off they headed, and several miles down the road one sister asked where Billy was. Billy??? NO ONE HAS BILLY???! They headed frantically back to the house, where poor Billy, strapped into his little infant seat, sat in the middle of the dining room table, waiting. The story is legend in their family, and when she told it, we all laughed and several other people piped up with similar stories - being left in the the grocery store, losing a sibling in the bathroom at the gas station - it happened then and it happens now.

I lost track of my own young daughter in the middle of China, in a tiny town where our bus had stopped for lunch. She walked to a park with part of our group after asking my permission; upon their return, each adult thought she was with someone else. I was panic stricken for all of 10 minutes, til my resourceful daughter came walking toward us, holding hands with a little Chinese girl who knew where the bus full of Americans was eating. We ran to each other and sobbed with relief - but what if she hadn’t found a kind stranger? What if something sinister had happened? I’d be living with unbearable guilt for the rest of my life - and I’d want to blame someone, anyone, for the loss of my child. But I’d know, as I know now, that it was an accident, a mistake caused by the very humanness that makes us all real. The people who’d walked with her to the park were horrified when they realized she hadn’t made it back, but the outcome would not have been changed by their remorse or my guilt.

This family has been shattered. They will never, ever be the same. They didn’t do anything any more wrong than the mistakes most of us make through the course of any given week. What is it that caused so many people to lash out at them, insist what they’ve done is worse, is punishable? The outcome was worse, yes - far worse than any of us are willing to believe might be possible in our own families, our own lives.

Ahhhh. And therein lies the rub. They MUST have done something more wrong - something so bad they must be punished, taught a lesson.

Otherwise, might this happen . . . to me?

According to this article, Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is being reissued. Timely reading? Depends on what audience at which this is aimed.

I seriously doubt conservatives of the Rove/Norquist stripe will have much sympathy with Goldwater, who now seems admirable and even iconic compared to the dunces dancing to the tune of the Far Right today.

It might be well to remember that traditional conservatism bears little substantive resemblance to what passes as popular conservatism today. Since Reagan, the Right has taken up the gauntlet of attack as its primary ethic, and this is now costing them.

It has been asked in recent decades just what Liberals stand for, but I think the question is better applied to Conservatives. A quick glance at the Right’s c.v.s suggests they stand for fewer taxes, more rigid controls on judicial interference with private business, fewer taxes, banning sex, fewer taxes, weakening environmental conservation, fewer taxes, more expensive health care, fewer taxes…

Not an impressive list. They have become reactive, even when they clearly had won the field in popular support, shouting back at the Left as if people still weren’t listening, and it has become all they seem to do. Goldwater’s considered conservatism is almost balm-like in its relative rationalism.

Conservatism itself has never been a bad thing. Harkening back to an earlier time, all it meant was being more cautious, being less willing to spend public money on “What if?” proposals, and being averse to change for change’s sake. It meant relying on the vast resource of the private sector to solve most problems instead of assuming that corporations automatically meant bad things about to happen.

Liberalism, on the other hand, was once all about Free Markets. Laissez-faire capitalism is a liberal invention. It meant, in this formulation, opening up opportunities for those kept artificially out by a staid and traditional set of procedures.

Things change. We have now devolved in politics to what amounts to screaming matches, cut fights, and ritual playground games, with both sides lining up on opposite sides to denounce anything the other side offers. It has perverted the discourse.

Consider: birth control is a privacy issue. It ought to be the most conservative issue we have. Conservatives who traditionally would denounce any invasion of privacy as an infringement on fundamental rights should embrace the notion of a right to choose almost reflexively.

Consider: Barry Goldwater became a mighty advocate of environmentalism. Preserving the land, nurturing natural resources, ought to be a seedbed for conservative activism.

Consider: Involvement in foreign wars has been the legacy of our most progressive and (in a contemporary sense) Liberal presidents. Conservatives have generally been averse to what amounts to gunpowder diplomacy, yet that situation has now reversed itself profoundly.

Since the end of WWII, a brand of conservatism has evolved, exemplified early on by writers like Phyllis Schlafly, that has less to do with authentic conservatism and mostly to do with the creation of an established order wherein public policy amounts to little more than protectionism of the privileges of an elite. The desire for a preconceived social order, supportive of the self-selected “natural” rights of those on the top end of private money, has predominated this strain of rightwing thought. Fewer taxes, to these folks, does not so much equate with less public service as it does to less government oversight. Environmental policy ends with what one of these folks can see from the front porch of his or her mansion in the midst of a vast estate. Denial of birth control has less to do with any moral right than it is a method of keeping the lower incomes population bound to a cycle of child-rearing that makes it virtually impossible for most of them ever to rise up economically–or intellectually–to challenge the status quo. (When I say intellectually, what I mean is this: how many people have the time or resource to continue an education when they have children to raise and more children to raise? Some can manage, but without a viable method of child care, this becomes categorically impossible—and what is one of the chief failures of the welfare and antipoverty programs of the past four decades? No child care.)

Rove, Norquist, Reed, Schalfly, Coulter, Riley, Limbaugh, Lott….these folks would not be recognized by Barry Goldwater as conservatives. They are wanna-be aristos.

But this just makes the response of the Left even more problematic. Not all aspects of conservatism are repugnant, and not all conservatives are fascists. It is a mistake to shut out their voices simply because they’re on the other side of the playground.

Maybe checking out Goldwater’s book would be a good place to start over. We might discover, under the detritus of 27 years of ugly schoolyard rumbles, that we have more in common than we think.

As Eliott Spitzer writes:  

SCHIP is a program that provides health care to children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private health insurance.

It’s a program that provides medical care, including preventive medical care, to innocent children.  According to the Bush Administration, we shouldn’t offer it, because these families can supposedly drive their kids to hospital emergency rooms for their preventative care.

These kids are from families that don’t make much, in the range of $51,625 for a family of four.  These are the working poor and the working middle class.  To put this in perspective, the cost of insurance for a family of four is closing in on $1000/month.  What are the odds that a family making in the range of $51,625 is shelling out 20% of their gross income for health insurance?

What should a responsible government do to make certain that children who are not covered by Medicaid (these children aren’t) are covered?   It’s difficult to find an issue where the differences in ideology between conservatives and progressives are more stark. 

To learn more, see the video at this site. 

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller.  Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew.  He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.

But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor?  When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements.  When people are good, they are not really good because of religion.  To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”  (Page 167).  Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:

It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”

When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.

Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident.  They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves.  We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under the protective name, wonder how on earth natural selection could favor it. … the insect nervous system is adept at setting up a temporary rule of thumb of this kind: “steer a course such that the light rays hit your eye at an angle of 30°.”  Though fatal in this particular circumstance, the moth’s rule of thumb is still, on average, a good one because, for a moth, sightings of candles are rare compared to sightings of the moon.  We don’t notice the hundreds of moths that are silently and effectively steering by the moon or a bright star, or even the glow from a distant city.  We see only moths wheeling into our candle, and we asked the wrong question: why are all these moths committing suicide?

Applying this byproduct theory to religious behavior, Dawkins observes that most people hold beliefs that “flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts.”  They hold these beliefs “with passionate certitude.”  Why? Perhaps, writes Dawkins, natural selection has built child brains for us.  Brains “with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them.  Such trusting obedience is viable for survival: the analog of steering by the moon for a moth.”  (Page 176).

Unfortunately, this sometimes helpful tendency can be infected by “mind viruses.”  Religious leaders pick up on this vulnerability and take advantage of it.  Religion even seems to be a byproduct of several normal psychological dispositions.  Citing Pascal Boyer, Dawkins argues that religion can also be seen as a byproduct for the mis-firing of various mental modules, “for example, the modules for forming theories of others’ minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favor of in group members and against strangers.”

At bottom, it is clear that, for Dawkins, religion is not an adaptation.  For this reason, Dawkins argues that we should not expect that practicing a religion will make us better off as an individual or a society.  Hence, his unrelenting attacks on religion. 

But is it really so clear that religion is a harmful byproduct of evolution?  In “Beyond the Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins Is Wrong about Religion,” David Sloan Wilson argues that Richard Dawkins’ critique, “however well-intentioned, is . . . deeply misinformed.”  D.S. Wilson further argues that Dawkins’ book fails to actually apply evolutionary theory to religion.  Yes, Dawkins is an expert in evolution.  On the other hand, in The God Delusion, Dawkins is writing as “just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for religion to vent his personal opinions about religion.”  D.S. Wilson argues it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work to see whether religion might, indeed, be an adaptation. (more…)

In an article recently published on BldgBlog (HT: Boing Boing), there’s an absolutely fascinating interview with Michael Cook, a Canadian writer and photographer who devotes himself to exploring the subterranean infrastructure - that is to say, the storm sewers, spillways, abandoned hydroelectric complexes, dams, and all manner of tunnels and drains - that lie unseen beneath our cities like a vast, hidden world under the world.

The interview includes many truly stunning pictures. Many of these places are quite beautiful - often in a sort of noir, industrial sense, granted, but there are also concrete spillways running through wilderness and forest, storm drains that form spectacular waterfalls, and vast, soaring tunnels where light pours down as if in a cathedral. (There are more pictures on Cook’s own site, Vanishing Point.)

But even the less beautiful tunnels give me a feeling of obscure fascination. All my life, I’ve been enthralled by the idea of hidden places - those secret, forgotten realms, lost in the interstices of society and accessible only to the privileged few who have knowledge of their existence. There are, as Cook notes, whole interconnected layers of human history down in the dark that cry out to be studied and recorded.

As well, these explorations can give one an entirely new perspective on our society and the vast, complex infrastructure that maintains it - an infrastructure that most people never even know exists, much less see. It may well be that many people dismiss the notion of environmental protection only because they are unaware of just how much effort goes into sustaining our civilization, and what a fragile balance exists between humanity and nature.

Here’s what Edwards had to say on August 23 in New Hampshire: 

Real change starts with being honest — the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It’s rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It’s rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it’s rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They’ll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are — not for the country, but for themselves.

[The system is] controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it’s perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don’t stand a chance.

This is spot on.  But Edwards wasn’t finished, as reported by Alternet:

“Let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience,” Edwards said last week. “You cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.”

Now we need a dozen other candidates telling it like it is, plus hundreds of elected officials willing to do something about it.  All of that is a long way off.   Edwards’ speech was important, though.  All important journeys begin with a single step. 

Richard Dawkins is famous for his criticisms of organized religion. 

In this new two-part video (see here and here), he moves on to examine spiritualists, faith healers, dowsers, homeopaths, astrologers and others who shun evidence in order to practice their unsubstantiated trades.

Much of this video is straightforward and succinctly edited. Dawkins restrains himself in his many conversations that appear in the video.  He lets the quacks speak their own words and he allows them to put their best foot forward.   Not that he doesn’t sometimes get in his digs, for instance with Deepak Chopra, who exhibits absolutely no understanding of quantum physics despite making millions on books in which he allegedly invokes principles of quantum physics.

The general themes are well stated in the video.  We are disparaging real science and medicine yet giving unsubstantiated alternative medicine a free ride.  Why?  Because we are a society that is, more than ever, willing to value private feelings over evidence.  Unfortunately, this makes us vulnerable to those who obscure the truth (e.g., charlatans like Chopra).

There’s this odd thing about alternative therapies:  the more we look at them, the weaker they look.  At least this is true for those who aren’t striving to believe in them.  Why do we do this?  Dawkins suggests that it is perhaps an evolutionary adaptation.  We have evolved to see patterns even when they don’t exist.  To be that other kind of animal, one that tends not to see patterns, would be too dangerous.  That might actually be a predator behind that bush!  For many of us, this over-tendency to see patterns has apparently generalized into a form of naiveté when it comes to alternative therapies. 

To see Dawkins’ encounter with Chopra, go to Part II, about 19:00.  To see the section on homeopathic medicine, see Part II at 23:00.  

In the meantime, spiritualist book titles outnumber real science books 3-to-1.   And one-fourth of the public believes in astrology, which serves as a sort of poster-boy for all of these shoddy disciplines:  What makes them “work” is that they allow us to keep thinking that humans are the true center of the universe.  All of the stars revolve around us.  Therapies work because we want them to work.  Ergo, no need for evidence.  Just keep believing . . . 

Here’s the headline: “Gas prices drop nearly 3 cents in last 2 weeks Survey: U.S. avarage now at $2.75 a gallon.”  

And here’s the lead paragraph:

The national average price for gasoline dropped about 2.9 cents over the last two weeks, according to a survey released Sunday.

These sorts of headlines (they are common) are symptoms of a society horribly addicted to a fragile supply of a dwindling resource.  Ours is a society that could be brought to its knees by the shutdown of one refinery, or the intentional sinking of one oil tanker.

We should be quickly moving to a new economy where a 1% change in the cost of an energy source causes nothing but a yawn.  Unfortunately, there is no indication that any American politician “gets it” that we should be implementing any such changes.

Yes, we have a reckless energy policy.  A reckless, feckless, energy policy.

I’m planning on packing my camcorder and asking a few dozen random people some questions to test their knowledge on various topics.  I’m doing this because I suspect that many people lack basic knowledge regarding important topics.  Other questions are geared to checking people’s attitudes regarding important issues.

Below you can see that I have a list of 20 questions.  If anyone reading this has any suggestions for questions I should use, please suggest them in the comments.   After I finish this survey (which I hope to do within a month, I will publish the results and put some of the resulting video on YouTube.

This is a work in progress for now, so please suggest away . . .

1. Name 3 of your favorite sports stars.
2. What’s the most dangerous country to the US?  What should we do about it?
3. Locate it on a map (lacking country names).
4. What is the world’s most important religion? Why?
5. About how many years ago did dinosaurs last walk on earth?
6. Name the three branches of the U.S. government.
7. When was the American Revolution?  Who did we fight?
8. Why is Albert Einstein famous?
9. Why is the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution Important?
10. Who invented the Golden Rule?
11. What is Evolution?
12. What did William Shakespeare do that made him famous?
13. Name a book of the Bible where you can read the Ten Commandments?
14. What’s the official religion of the United States?
15. What is the solar system? What is the closest star to the Earth?
16. Approximately how many times is Jesus mentioned in the U.S. Constitution?
17. Name 3 miracles of Jesus, according to the Bible?
18. When were the Gospels written?  By whom?
19. According to the Bible, did God ever kill babies?
20. If other countries won’t sell us their oil, should the U.S. attack them with our military?

In Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t (2007), Stephen Prothero’s describes the United States is described as the most religious nation in the developed world.  Prothero also describes Americans as “the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world.”

How ignorant are Americans? It’s shocking.  Here is how the Washington Post summed up the statistics:

According to polls conducted by the National Constitution Center, only one third of Americans can name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Is it any more startling that only one third can identify the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount?

A 2005 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly two-thirds of Americans endorse the simultaneous teaching of creationism and evolution in public schools. How can citizens know what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if fewer than half can identify Genesis? No doubt the same proportion of Americans think that Thomas Edison said, “Let there be light.”

Approximately 75 percent of adults, according to polls cited by Prothero, mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” More than 10 percent think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and — a finding that will surprise many — evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts.

I know that numerous chiropractors swear by homeopathy. I even know of a couple MD’s who push homeopathic “remedies.”  It makes me shake my head because A) homeopathic theory (e.g., “the law of infinitesimals” and “the law of similars”) makes no sense and 2) homeopathic remedies and double-blind studies don’t mix.

Homeopathy is a painfully well-known placebo that millions of well-educated people just can’t bear to give up.  They know that it can’t really work according to the theory of its promoters, but they just can’t part from that juicy hit of placebo.

I recently ran across a science website with good energy, lots of engaging stories and commentors chomping at the bit.  It’s called Bad Science.   The post that most recently caught my interest is on homeopathy, more specifically a highly suspicious article in the “British Journal of Homeopathy” that claims that water “has a memory.”  Check out the comments for a rousing tour of the many failings of homeopathy.   One fellow apologizes for peeing in the ocean when he was young, because he didn’t realize the effect that it was going to have on everyone in the future.

For more information on the bad science of homeopathy, including a stab at one of my favorite psuedo scientists, Deepak Chopra, consider this article from the Skeptical Inquirer.  Here’s an excerpt:

Quite apart from the matter of how the water/alcohol mixture remembers, there are obvious questions that cry out to be asked: 1) Why does the water/alcohol mixture remember the healing powers of an active substance, but forget the side effects? 2) What happens when the drop of solution evaporates, as it must, from the lactose tablet? Is the memory transferred to the lactose? 3) Does the water remember other substances as well? Depending on its history, the water might have been in contact with a staggering number of different substances.

Homeopathy is only one of many forms of medical quackery being hawked to a scientifically naive public by researchers and public spokespeople who refuse to allow facts get in the way of their favorite version of snake oil:

The public is spending billions of dollars annually on sugar pills to cure their sniffles, hand waving to speed recovery from operations, and good thoughts to ward off illness, all with assurances that it’s based on science. Society has been set up for this fleecing in part by the media’s sensationalized coverage of modern science. Popular discussions of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos often leave people with the impression that common sense cannot be relied on — anything is possible. Scientists themselves often feed the public’s appetite for the “weirdness” of modern science in an effort to stimulate interest — or simply because scientists, too, can be beguiled by the mysterious.

I wish there were more of a placebo effect associated with the reading of science done carefully.  Maybe then we wouldn’t waste so much money and energy on all of those other placebo-effect inducers, including homeopathy.

Governor Bill Richardson’s plan isn’t nuanced:

That means no airbases, no embedded soldiers training Iraqi forces, no troops in the Green Zone. Zero troops. I would leave the customary marine contingent at our Embassy, but if that became unsafe, then I’d bring them home too. Only then can the diplomatic process of reconciliation and reconstruction truly begin, and the US must lead the way in making it happen.

Some commentors on Huffpo objected, saying that it would take a long time to remove all those troops.  Another commentor responded:

I’m not a logistics expert, but how do 80,000+ fans leave the Rose Bowl, get in your gas guzzling SUV and drive. We only have 160,000? troops there. Airlift some equipment/personel from Baghdad then move the rest north toward NATO Turkey and south to Kuwait, with air support. The bigger risk to the troops is if they stay there. I don’t think you need 6 months to do that, maybe 6 days. I think most Iraqis would be thrilled to let us leave peacefully.

Richardson is one of the Democrats running for President.  Here is Richardson’s campaign site.

I’ve made no secret that I admire and trust Bill Moyers for his enlightened journalism.  Here is yet more evidence, an 8-minute video on the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

OK, believers.  It’s allright for the rest of you guys to step forth and admit those doubts that all of you have.  CBS has reported that Mother Teresa has unwittingly led the way, thanks to the disclosure of tormented letters she wrote:

Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.

“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.

“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.

“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”

According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said.

That Mother Teresa had such doubts doesn’t surprise me at all.  All honest Believers admit to having these doubts, at least when I discuss matters of faith with them one-on-one.  If you listen to them at church, however, it’s a totally different story.  In a church, when they are among other “Believers,” they suddenly become cocksure of their supernatural beliefs.  I’ve seen this over and over–the doubt “vanishes” when it becomes socially inconvenient. This oscillation of Belief tells me that having a Belief is not about having any confidence that one’s most supernatural claims are true. 

Over the years, at least four active priests have told me, one-on-one, that they have recurring doubts about the most basic aspects of their faith.  Put them next to a pulpit on Sunday morning, though, and it’s time to rock and roll with doubtless expositions of supernatural claims.  In church, there is no doubt that bread turns into flesh, that Mary actually levitated into heaven and that if people want to get to heaven, they have to get their by following the rules of a bureaucratic church. 

The moral of this post?  I know that you Believers all have deep and recurring doubts.  Why can’t we start our conversations with that as the starting point?  Why can’t we start our discussions of religion by acknowledging that you Believers don’t really know many of the things that you claim to know?  This would be a healthier common ground for our conversations, scary as it is for you.  Can’t we just admit that that all of us posit meaning in strange and ineffable ways, that this meaning is a rickety ephemeral scaffolding and that all of us are glaringly ignorant of the evidence we actually need to answer any of our “ultimate” questions?

The answer to religious strife is intellectual humility.

ps.  I do hope that Mother Teresa hasn’t crossed the line into denying the Holy Spirit!

Comedy Central presented this interview in two parts:

That is the opinion of Nir Rosen, independent journalist and the author of “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.”  In this interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org Rosen comments that Iraq is still losing 50,000 people per month. 

Where are these refugees going?  To many other countries.

Syria is the most open and generous of all the countries in the region. They basically take anybody who comes in. And for a long time, they were giving them free healthcare, and they still provide free education. Well, they’ve been — they are being overburdened, as well, because the Syrian government subsidizes things such as bread. So every loaf of bread an Iraqi buys is actually being paid for in part by the Syrian government. As a result, they’re finding it more and more difficult to bear the cost.

The Jordanians basically closed their borders by the end of 2005, in part because they were being overburdened, and they also have demographic issues to worry about. Half of the small Jordanian population are Palestinian, and now you’ve introduced another million Iraqis. And this is a very fragile regime in the first place, the Jordanian dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: What does each country gain by letting in Iraqi refugees?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Jordan took in initially many of the wealthier ones, as did Egypt, and so they certainly gained a great deal of money and investment, and they required for residency a certain amount of money in the bank. But Jordan was a less friendly environment for Shias. Syria, again, is the most friendly environment for really any Iraqi; Shias, Sunnis, Christians each find welcoming neighborhoods there. Lebanon, very difficult to get to, and there’s a likelihood of being expelled by the Lebanese government, but Christian Iraqis have found that the Christians of Lebanon have been generous in protecting them. Shia Iraqis have tended to go into the Shia neighborhoods of Beirut. Egypt closed its borders more or less after about 150,000 Iraqis came in, mostly Sunni. The majority of the Iraqi Arab refugees are Sunnis, despite the fact that Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. And Sweden has taken in, I think, 40,000 or 50,000, as well. They’ve been quite generous. As you’ve said, we took in about 700, which is a laughable amount.

The interview eventually turned to Iran.  Why is the Bush administration obsessed about attacking Iran?

NIR ROSEN: Well, I think we’re dealing with a mentality on the part of our administration that nobody else is going to have the guts to take on Iran in the future, the next president, so if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it, and we’ll be vindicated in the future just like Reagan was vindicated, allegedly, for bringing down the Soviet Union. So they have this long-term view of how history will treat them, and if they don’t take down Iran, nobody else will, which is probably the case, although they can’t take down Iran, either.

Iran is not Iraq. You can bomb it, but I think you’d only basically strengthen the support for the government, as always happens when you bomb a country. We saw this in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. And they’ve been blaming Iran for everything under the sun lately, for supporting Sunni radicals in Iraq or attacking the Iranian-backed leadership in Iraq, for attacking — and then they blame Iran for supporting the Taliban, who, of course, were bitter enemies of Iran. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If you somehow haven’t yet figured out how the incessant lies of FOX led us to begin the senseless bloody occupation of Iraq, you can catch it all again. Except it’s about Iran now. This video comparing the FOX campaigns against Iraq and Iran is almost unbelievable. Is there anyone really willing to believe such disinformation a second time around? But we’re in full swing and there’s no powerful media voice blowing the whistle.

Here is a Yahoo.com story on this video comparison.

Amy Goodman had this to say about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

FAIR did a a study. In the week leading up to General Colin Powell going to the security council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards, this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion. They did a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, ABC evening news and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. 393 interviews on war. 3 were anti-war voices. 3 of almost 400 and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

The question is whether enough people running mainstream media care enough to vigorously contest the current round of lies regarding Iran.

In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast majority of people were incapable of the kind of intellectual comprehension necessary for an informed plebiscite. In short, they knew people were ill-educated and believed this meant they could not parse abstraction. By the mid-19th century, though, reading was probably the most common form of home entertainment.

America has championed the idea of public education. Our publishing companies have been at the forefront of issuing special editions of “Great Books”, and we have turned our economy into a college degree-driven dynamo. Yet the most basic reasons to read seem ignored by most, along with the habit of reading after leaving school.

A few quotes:

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

“By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” Charels Caleb Colton

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.” Oliver Goldsmith

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” Horace Mann

And finally, a lengthier quote from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

“There is no single way to read well, though these is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.” Harold Bloom

I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. I caught what is known as the Reading Bug around age 10, and ever since there has rarely been a year when I did not read at least thirty books cover to cover, averaging sixty to seventy a year. My senior year of high school I cut most days and spent them in the local public library, where I achieved an enviable (and now inconceivable) rate of a book a day, and tore through most of the so-called Classics that year.

“Why do you always have your face in a book?”

This question was never asked by my parents. My parents, when early on they realized I was reading so much, increased my allowance so I could buy more books (a paperback then was sixty cents). No, this came from “friends” who rarely read, who equated reading with school, which they disliked, and for whom reading had unfortunately become a chore.

I blame the educational system for that. English, as taught in the schools then, had the unfortunate effect of beating a love of reading out of most kids. They could never just have fun with a book, they had to analyze it and “find meaning.” The fact is, meaning is such a individualized thing, it must be discovered individually. Telling someone that what they thought was important about a book is wrong because they do not pick up on the “deeper meanings” of the text is a sure way to turn them off unless they are already dedicated readers. And ridiculing the literature of choice of a student will put the nail in the coffin.

“Why should I learn how to jump through those hoops? This reading stuff is a pain.”

Add to that the simple fact that reading is Not Social, and you have the makings of a functionality illiterate society.

Not illiterate in the sense that they cannot read a sentence, but in the sense that so many people do not know how to access literature.

It takes practice. Learning how to decode the words on the page and make the images in your mind the author hopes you do takes learning. It’s an acquired skill that improves over time and repeated exposure, and those who figure it out become those people who are content to sit alone somewhere with a book.

Is this really important?

Reading enlarges the capacity of the imagination. No other medium does that, with the possible exception of music (but only in certain limited respects). How else does one get to a point where empathy becomes so developed that we can literally understand a person from another culture without having gone through their experiences?

I do not mean understand them as if we had lived their life, but understand the differences and the depth of similarities that hang on those differences.

Movies do the work of the imagination for us. Video games as well.

When asked whether I believe violent movies and television feed violence in society, I have to admit that, yes, I do. But only because there’s nothing between the raw, unformed pysche of the young and the insistent imagery, nothing to mediate, to give context, to offer viable alternatives, and nothing that has aided the development of skeptical buffers. Reading does that. It does it by forcing the mind to do the work of contextualizing, of comprehending meaning. When you read, you are an active participant, engaged in the process of judging, of analyzing, of making sense of the text—and the text itself offers context that is often missing from a visual experience.

I hasten to add here that this is true of all reading, but more true of broad reading. People who basically read the same book over and over again may begin the process of enlarging their imaginations, but then it falters, ill-fed and poorly exercised.

People who read a lot are often more interesting—mainly because they start off by being more interested, by virtue of the worlds they’ve encountered on the page.

Lastly, though, books are the connective tissue of our civilization, past to future. You cannot talk to Ben Franklin in the flesh, but he’s there, in print. Likewise Aristotle, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Twain, Tolkein, all worthy minds who left their vision behind to talk to us. Books are the avatars of their creators, and once opened are fully interactive.

I have no idea how to turn this trend around. Many things conspire to rob us of a literate culture, not least of which is a sheer lack of time. We work longer hours, necessities cost more, there are people around us demanding attention. But it’s a mistake not to see reading as a necessary thing.

Those who are parents might consider easing up on the team sports and the implicit ridicule of always forcing the child to go play with friends. Books are friends. Spending all the time with a book is no better, though, than spending no time with one at all.

I grew up in a house in which it was ordinary to see everyone quietly reading. I’ve been in houses where there wasn’t a single book to be found.

But most importantly, we need to stop asking that reading be defended. “What’ good is it? What use is it?” The use and good of it is self-evident over time, but just reading, at any given moment, should be no more odd than having a conversation with someone—which no one really questions.

Given the recent stupidity expressed in much of our public life these past several years, I think it’s time to advocate reading a bit more. And not just “prescribed” reading. I have a poster on my wall, a picture of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—yes, the one the magazine was named for—and the quote says “Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming conflict.”

Last year, I took my kids to see Onondaga Cave located in Leasburg, Missouri. The state of Missouri runs this site.  The park rangers present visitors with detailed descriptions regarding the geology of the cave.  These descriptions often include time frames that run in the hundreds of millions of years.  Here’s a sample, from the Onondaga Cave website:

About a billion years ago, the Ozarks were a hotbed of volcanic activity centered about 45 miles to the southeast, in Iron and Reynolds counties. The igneous remains of this activity formed the surface of granites, rhyolites, felsites and basalts that are exposed there. These rocks are the basement layer here, about 1,000 to 1,500 feet below the cave. This basement layer is not flat but tilted. About 600 million years ago, this volcanic activity calmed and the region cooled, condensing great amounts of water vapor, which formed shallow (about 200 foot deep) seas. These seas were the birthplace of the Eminence and Gasconade formations of dolomite, chert, sandstone and shale in which Onondaga Cave is formed. It is believed that the Ozarks were uplifted above sea level (or the seas retreated, take your pick) four times before they fell for the last time about 280 million years ago. One final major uplift (of dry land) took place 50 million to 7 million years ago.

For those who enjoy exploring large case, Onondaga is a terrific place to visit. It is a place to see a spectacular natural wonder and to learn a lot in the process.

Missouri has a second enormous cave, Meramec Caverns.   As you can see from the Meramec Caverns website, the private owners of this second cave are absolutely unwilling to say anything about geology.  This cave is marketed as a place where Jesse James and his gang hid some of their loot. It is also a place to buy fudge and ice cream, according to much of the advertising.  The website also promotes Meramec Caverns as a place to attend church services. Meramec Caverns is marketed through the use of almost 50 billboards located between St. Louis and Stanton Missouri (site of the cave), a distance of less than 80 miles.  None of these billboards mentions anything about the geology of the cave.

As it turns out, Meramec Caverns is an incredible cave, well worth exploring. Nowhere during the tour, however, did our tour guide mentione anything about the age of the cave or the dates on which important geological events occurred.  At the end of our one-hour tour I approached the tour guide and asked her about the age of the cave.  She hesitantly responded that the cave was formed in “prehistoric” times.  I told her that “prehistoric” included a wide range of time.  “What more can you tell me about the age of this cave?”

The woman sheepishly admitted to me that she doesn’t usually mention the age of the cave because many of the visitors on these tours have become perturbed with her.  Some of these visitors heckle her in front of the other visitors. (more…)

Though this is a “family” website, it is also a subversive family website. In that spirit, I’ll continue. This post was triggered by a family vacation. My family stayed in a cabin at a Missouri state park. We had a great time.  

I know that the word “cabin” conjures up thoughts and images of no electricity, no A/C, no refrigerator, no stove and no living room. Actually, our “cabin” had all of these things, yet the park still considers it to be a “cabin.” Our cabin also had two identical light fixtures on the ceiling of the cabin’s living room. Rather than describe the light fixtures, I’ll just post a photo.

There. Do you see the issue?  These light fixtures (again, there were two identical light fixtures on the living room ceiling) look like human female breasts.  OK, I know some of you are already protesting.  For you prudish people, take a deep breath and go back to ponder the photo a few more seconds.

In my opinion, these fixtures were intentionally designed to look like breasts. I have no doubt. If you have doubts, ask yourself whether there is anything they could have done to make these light fixtures look more like breasts.   Truly, these fixtures have it all.  Supple-yet-pouting contour, symmetrical and distinctive areolas, first-rate nipples. I suspect that these lights were made as a joke by a lighting company.  To the surprise of the company, millions of customers lined up, each of them driven to purchase this fixture by their uncontrollable subconscious impulses.  The customers likely said and thought things like “Oh, look at that elegant fixture, that traditional profile.”

To keep sales jumping, all the manufacturer needed was a vast conspiracy of silence on the part of the few of us who dared to consciously acknowledge what was really going on.  Until today, that conspiracy held. 

My vaction at the “cabin” was not the first time I’d ever seen such a breast-light fixture.  For many years I’ve seen dozens of these light fixtures in very important places, places like conference rooms and several large opulent courtrooms. Now that I’ve brought this issue to the forefront, I challenge you to take notice too.  These breast-fixtures are ubiquitous.

I’ll end with a request.  If anyone really knows anything about this design, please send in your comments.  Until I am instructed otherwise, I hereby deem this design “The Emperor’s New Light Fixture.”