The Freedom From Religion Foundation is decorating Madison, Wisconsin with ”Beware of Dogma” billboards this month.

What is the FFRF? The following mission statement is from the FFRF website:

The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.

In modern times the first to speak out for prison reform, for humane treatment of the mentally ill, for abolition of capital punishment, for women’s right to vote, for death with dignity for the terminally ill, and for the right to choose contraception, sterilization and abortion have been freethinkers, just as they were the first to call for an end to slavery.

The Foundation works as an umbrella for those who are free from religion and are committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church.

People have all kinds of hobbies.  Some people like to knit.  Other people like to collect stamps.  I like to go to church while playing the role of “anthropologist.”

When I am thinking about visiting a church, my biggest decision is deciding what church to visit.  That was my decision three days ago. I had already been to a stern and humorless evangelical church.  The thing I remembered about that church was the scriptural quotation featured on the T-shirts of hundreds of the people attending: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”  It was a quote from Proverbs 1:7.  I remember thinking “Of all the quotes they could’ve chosen from the Bible, this one is strange indeed.  Any good teacher knows that the best students are driven by natural curiosity and a good dose of skepticism, not by fear.”

Back to my task of choosing a church.  Last week, I just happened to be in the car listening to a fundamentalist A.M. radio station when I heard neocon talk show host Paul McGuire ranting about a new crop of churches designed for young people, churches that allegedly don’t spend enough time on the Bible but, instead, cater to the social needs of the congregation.  Maguire’s rant went on for several minutes, long enough for me to conclude that I simply had to go to one of these new hip churches to see for myself.

As it turns out, one of those new “emerging” churches is located about a mile from my house and it is called The Journey.  This is not your mama and papa’s church, as you can tell from the pictures below.  First of all, how many churches have their website featured prominently on their sign?  This building used to be owned by a Catholic Church, but the Catholics are busy turning ever-more conservative, it seems.  In fact, the pope just announced that Catholic pharmacists should not dispense evil drugs such as birth control pills.  This top-down management style has had the effect of running off lots of actual or potential Catholic parishioners. Hence, the closing of this particular Catholic Church and its sale to “The Journey.”

After I entered the church, I noticed that the Catholic statues had been removed (Catholics love forelorn-looking statues) and that the inside of the church had been painted in strikingly tasteful Ralph Laurenesque colors.  There was no altar, but only a stage with music stands and microphones.  There was a wooden crucifix, but no graphic image of mutilated and bleeding man on that cross.  Featured more prominently than the cross was a big screen above the cross on which the song lyrics and the PowerPoint images relating to the sermon would be projected.

As I walked into this church of The Journey (which has existed since only 2002) I heard Coldplay and other popular music amplified throughout the building.  The people in the church were casually dressed and fairly young (typically ranging from their 20s to their 40s).  I couldn’t help but notice that the men were more handsome than average and the women were more beautiful than average, compared to many other churches I’ve attended. It was like going to an upscale bar, except there was no alcohol or smoking and it was Sunday morning. Compared to other churches I’ve attended, these people tended to be in much better physical shape and they looked much more focused and animated than many congregations, based upon their facial expressions.  As I walked through the church trying to decide where to sit, the parishioners were notably friendly (though church-goers all tend to be friendly when they get together). I couldn’t help but think that this is a different kind of crowd than one would find in many churches, and that this place had been transformed into their place, a place where many traditions and formalisms would be left behind.

The service began when a man came out and greeted the people by saying “Hi, I’m Mike.”  Mike played the guitar and sang, leading the parishioners in the singing of several songs, accompanied by an accordionist.  The sound system was outstanding.  (more…)

The title means what it says. These expressions remind me of watching people’s faces as they turn their cars around corners–their driving expressions. Just take a look next time you’re at an intersection. Many of them have their tongues hanging out or they are grimacing. Yet driving a car is nothing compared to amazing things these divers are doing.

Why would a scientist pull a paper that he had out there for over 50 years? Because he is embarrassed that Creationists are eagerly citing parts of it as proof that life cannot have arisen spontaneously. Here’s the story.

That is not because he objects to religion, he said… “Religion is O.K. as long as you don’t fly in the face of facts.” After all, he said, no one can disprove the existence of God. But Dr. Jacobson said he was dismayed to think that people might use his work in what he called “malignant” denunciations of Darwin.

Those of us who follow these things know that Creationists make most of their points citing long-discarded ideas from very superseded papers that were (at their respective times) published in reputable journals by respected authorities.
On re-reading his own article these many decades later, he spotted several errors of fact, as well as misplaced assumptions.
One telling statement about his retraction is:

Dr. Jacobson’s retraction is in “the noblest tradition of science,” Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr. Jacobson’s letter.

His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, “the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction,” and people who “cling to dogma.”

In brief, a scientist can and should admit to a mistake. Reporting negative results, however and whenever arrived at, is the essential difference between the scientific method and earlier methods of understanding the world.

On October 20 and 21st, 2007, Blumenthal attended the Value Voters Summit, “a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.”

I admire Blumenthal’s work.  He sticks his nose under the tent to allow us to see what ordinary and celebrity neocons really think.  We get access to unvarnished ultra-conservatism at the click of a “Play” button, thanks to his persistent digging.  

This particular convention, the Value Voters Summit lets you see the far right the way they see each other.  It’s not the diluted version that they present when the national news shows come calling.  

For other videos by Blumenthal, see here (The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour) and here (his personal effort to draft College Republicans).

[If you found Blumenthal's video interesting, check out this 2007 Bill Moyers video regarding yet another ultra-conservative convention]

How do you organize, display and work with thousands of photos when you’re on a budget (or not)? 

My wife and I are raising two children.   When they were 0 and 2 years old (in the year 2000), we bought a digital camera and we started taking lots of photos of them.   How many photos?  An enormous number, given that we delete about 50% of our photos and that we still have 15,000 photos.  How does that happen? You take 20 here and 10 there.  You do it several times per week as your children grow up.  Then, when they get to be five or six, you let them take their own photos.  There’s no expensive film involved anymore, so you can let them go crazy.  Sure, you might find that they took 50 photos of the parakeet, but that’s how they learn.   In the meantime, you need to find a way to organize all of those photos (even after deleting 45 photos of the parakeet).

Until recently, I was using purchased software to organize and work with all of these photos.  For the past four years, for example, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Digital Image Library 9.  It’s a solid program with powerful yet easy-to-use editing.  If you want complete control over your photo-editing, however, you might want to use a more powerful program like Photoshop (or the consumer version, Photoshop Elements).   I was relatively happy with MS Digital Image until it refused to load new photos.  It became utterly obstinate and I couldn’t find any solution for the problem.  I tried many (MANY) things, and nothing worked.  Also, Digital Image had another glitch: the photos wouldn’t go to the folders where I told them to download.  Out of frustration, I started looking around for a photo-organizing program that would work.  I’m delighted with what I found:  Picasa 2.7

Doubtless, there will be professionals out there (and demanding amateurs) who will want some features beyond those offered by Picasa.  For those guys, expensive specialized software awaits.  For the rest of us, there is Picasa.

Picasa is a free program published by Google.  It sets up quickly and allows me to do everything I want to do with my photos.   You can organize them in many ways (by folder, by tags, by rating or by a custom album).  You can view your photos as slide shows.  You can import them from your camera (and they really go to the folder where you assign them).  You can burn the photos to a CD.   You can print them in a variety of ways.  You can view them in a really elegant “Timeline” feature.   Picasa organizes all of your videos along with your photos too.  Basic editing features are provided as well.

I really can’t think of anything more that I need in a photo organizing program.   I can’t imagine having a more user-friendly program. 

It’s difficult to believe that Picasa is free.   It’s really too good to be true.  Here’s where you can download your copy.

This sign is posted on the door of a local grocery store.  Could it be that they are afraid of . . . shoplifting?

This potential time-waster is equally potentially therapeutic. Nice sound effects. The rim shot realism is especially satisfying. It reminds me of a real life habit I picked up in law school; I often threw paper wads when I was supposed to be studying.

Here is a site at which you can access articles on lying and deception, including this article, entitled “How to Get the Truth Out of Anyone!” Seems like much of this advice is solid, based on my experience . . .

I learned of this site at another site called “Exciting Links for Boring Days.” Be careful or you could lose several hours checking out these whimsical sites. For instance, here’s the Etch-a-Sketch art champion. Here’s a big collection of high speed photography. Here’s a comparison of fast food promo photos with the way the food really looks. Or consider this as a gift: face/vase art.

Today, the following Associated Press article was run on page-19 of my local newspaper (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn’t have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York’s reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.

Across America, the picture is critically clear — the nation’s freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperature, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association, based in Denver.

Water managers will need to take bold steps to keep taps flowing, including conservation, recycling, desalination and stricter controls on development.

The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, utilities director for Pompano Beach, Fla.

Truly, this is a major story; our country is running out of a critically important resource.  Combine that lack-of-water news, though with the equally unreported news that the world is running out of another critically important resource: oil. How bad is it?  I’ve previously reported on the issue of peak oil before (and see here).

Recently, I’ve read a book that, even if it is only partially accurate, should be front page news in every newspaper in America, day after day.  

The book is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century, by James Howard Kunstler (2005).   Kunstler writes that

America is still sleepwalking into the future.  We walked out of our burning house and we are now headed off the edge of a cliff.  Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before.  I call this coming time The Long Emergency.

Kunstler writes that the main problem is the end of cheap oil and natural gas.  These resources

underlie everything we identify as a benefit of modern life.  All the necessities, comforts, luxuries and miracles of our time-central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lighting, cheap clothing, recorded music, movies, supermarkets, power tools, hip replacement surgery, the national defense, you name it-we owe their origins or continued existence in one way or another to cheap fossil fuel.

Kunstler argues that the steady technological progress we’ve experienced thanks to cheap oil has tricked us “into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough can come true.”

What are Kunstler’s facts?  Here are some of them (starting on page 66):

The total planetary endowment of conventional nonrenewable liquid oil was roughly 2 trillion barrels before humans started using it.  Since the mid-19th century, the world has burned through roughly one trillion barrels of oil, half the total there ever was, representing the easiest to get, highest-quality liquids.  The half that remains includes the hardest oil to get, lowest quality liquids, semi-solids, and solids.

Worldwide discovery of oil peaked in 1964 and has followed a firm trend line downward ever since. (more…)

What it was like to practice law 25 years ago without the use of any computers

It’s amazing to think that I’ve been a lawyer since 1981, which is more than 25 years ago.  The years are certainly going by quickly, which is a bit disconcerting. I currently work with some lawyers who were not even born when I became a lawyer.  I’m not bothered by my age (51), since I am healthy and I’m able to do essentially anything I want (racquetball, cycling, hiking).  In fact, I’m not really able to complain about anything at all.  My life has consisted of a string of fortunate occurrences, combined with some hard work.

The point of this post, though, is that I sometimes think back “only” 25 years ago to recall the role of computers in the law office back then.  The description is short and simple: there were no computers in law offices in the early 1980s.  This was true of most law firms in most cities. In the 1980’s, I worked at a medium-sized law firm that employed about 40 attorneys. There were no blackberries, no cell phones, no laptop computers and no desktop computers.  Back then, if you wanted to see a fancy gadget, you might look for a typewriter with a tiny LED screen that had a memory that could store a few pages of text.  The secretary (only special secretaries had access to these fancy machines) could type in a document, which would be stored in that modest memory, such that corrections could be made, and the document could be reprinted without rekeying the entire document.  That was as close as you got to a computer in most law offices in the 1980s.

Instead of computers, we had secretaries, lots and lots of secretaries, who transcribed attorneys’ dictation.  We dictated our documents onto small handheld tape recorders.  We would turn these tapes over to secretaries, who would type out the documents and bring them to us of our review and signature.  These documents were typed out on electric typewriters (almost none of them being those fancy LED typewriters described above).  As a result, if you found a mistake in the printed out letter, you often had to ask the secretary to retype the entire letter.  If it was a multipage letter, this could require the secretary to spend an hour or two (or even most of the day) typing the entire letter, just because you forgot to insert a paragraph in your dictation.  Many an attorney who needed to make a change in a document received the evil eye from his or her secretary; this was good incentive to think things through as well as you could prior to turning tapes over to secretaries. In fact, if you noticed that you forgot to include a paragraph in a document, your best strategy was to look to see whether the secretary herself had made some major mistakes that would require the letter to be retyped anyway.  Only then would you bring it to her attention.

If you find it tedious to think about running an office without computers, consider that letters were the shortest and easiest documents to retype.  I worked in a law office that specialized in litigation.  The documents we needed to produce included 20-, 30-, or 40-page legal pleadings.  Sometimes those documents would include appellate briefs that could run in excess of 50-pages.

During the past 15 years, more and more lawyers have been keying in their own documents, bypassing the need to hand dictation tapes to secretary.  In the 1990’s, attorneys keying in their own documents was frowned on by management; it amounted to attorneys doing “secretarial work.”   Eventually, attitudes changed, however.  Having access to a desktop computer has made life more bearable for many attorneys, who now have immediate access to the various drafts of documents.  Tiny changes can be made repeatedly, with no need to apologize to a secretary. In fact, I often create long summaries of documents without any use of the keyboard.  I’m doing it right now, using voice activation software (Dragon version 9).  One particular bright spot for me was that law firms have finally broken away from WordPerfect and moved to MSWord.  I know that there are some lawyers who will disagree, but WordPerfect 5.0 doesn’t bring me any warm memories.  Though many people became proficient at using it, it always seemed crude and clunky to me.

We did not have any such thing as a scanner at any of my law firms, until five years ago.  Therefore, every important piece of information was preserved in hard copy, if at all.  Sometimes, those critical pieces of paper were misplaced or lost entirely. This made it critically important to keep track of those important copies.  It’s so different now; I scan every important piece of paper that comes into my office, so that it is easily available and always available to me.

Until about 10 years ago, all communications were by telephone or written letter sent to the United States Postal Service. If something was extra important, it could be transmitted by fax, though most pleadings and letters were entrusted to the postal service only.  What’s missing in this picture?  E-mail.  Somehow we got along without any e-mail.  As I recall, most lawyers were not using any form of e-mail for business use until the mid-1990s.  In fact, most lawyers did not have any computer on their desks, even in the mid-1990s.

We’ve certainly made up for not having e-mail by the way we have overused e-mail in current times.  It used to be a curiosity to actually do business through e-mail.  This is not the case anymore, however.  Now, it seems that a typical day involves sending 30-50 e-mails and receiving 50-100 e-mails (admittedly, many of these e-mails received our mass mailings that could be quickly reviewed and deleted).  The upshot is that several hours of every working day involve sending and receiving dozens of e-mails, many of those containing important attachments.  Admittedly, much work is done through the exchange of these e-mails, and it is sometimes done extremely efficiently.  Most phone calls still require the exchange of pleasantries prior to getting down to business-this is often gratifying, although it does slow you down any keep you from getting home earlier at night.  Just imagine the difference in time of sending 10 e-mails versus making 10 phone calls.  Further, after every important phone call, responsible attorneys document that communication.  Who did you talk to and on what case?  What was said and by whom?  When you communicate through e-mail, all of that is automatically documented and therefore retrievable.

Computers have played yet another big role in the modern law office.  In the “old days,” to get a copy of a pleading, you had to physically go to the courthouse.  Even if you wanted to find out what was in the court file, you had to call a court clerk or traveled to the courthouse yourself and flipped through the legal file.  That is sometimes still the case.  On the other hand, many courts report their filings to a network that allows access by attorneys.  If I want to find out if a defendant was served in a particular case, I am often able to look that up at my desktop.

How did we ever get along without Outlook?  This situation is extremely hard to imagine now, even though I practiced as an attorney through that time period.  Nowadays, I’m always setting up meetings and alerts which guide me through every day and every week.  In the “old days,” paper calendars ruled.  In fact, if one were to have lost his or her paper calendar, it could’ve been a disaster, since there was simply no backup to that little book.  Now, Outlook tells me what to do, when to do it and where to go in real time.  It’s a super-charged calendar.  Yet I remember, even 5 years ago (and for some attorneys still) that many people resisted the move to an electronic calendar for fear of “losing the data,” as though paper calendars can’t be lost.

Litigation practice is littered with deadlines.  That is the nature of the practice, and these deadlines drive many lawyers to a state of high anxiety. Many of these deadlines involved filing pleadings.  In the “old days,” filing a pleading meant getting to the courthouse while the doors were unlocked and finding a clerk to stamp in your pleading to file it.  That is still the case in some courthouses, although the trend is to implement electronic filing.  This is a terrific idea that allows lawyers to electronically file pleadings from their own desktops in PDF form.  The system has been adopted by almost all federal courts, and state courts are now coming aboard as well.  The system means that you no longer have to drive anywhere to file a pleading on time.  In the “old days,” pleadings were occasionally lost.  Sometimes these important filings were lost under suspicious conditions.  That situation is now impossible with electronic filing, where pdf copies of all file documents are available 24/7 to anyone willing to pay the modest cost of accessing the documents.

Research has been totally transformed by computers.   In the 1980’s law libraries consisted entirely of books.   Often, critical volumes of books couldn’t be found, because they were removed by other attorneys who wanted to work in the privacy of their office.  If you wanted to do research at night, you needed to do it at a physical law library.  We often spent time at law school libraries, because no law firm actually had the space for all of the hard-copy books that are required to do a thorough job.  Things have changed dramatically, of course.  Now, any attorney with a laptop and a subscription to a legal research database has access to an entire law library’s worth of paper books.   Further, the ability of copying and pasting speeds forward the assembling of information necessary to create a brief.   Attorneys used to hover over copy machines as much as clerical staff.   That’s no longer the case.

During the last several years, remote accessing of one’s own law office network has become commonplace, allowing attorneys to work “at their desk.” It matter where they are in the entire world. This is a mixed blessing, of course.  It used to be that you simply could not do much work when you are on vacation (other than spending long hours on the telephone).  Now, it can sometimes be hard to justify staying away from the laptop and burning away vacation hours on work projects.  In fact, it is rare to hear of an attorney involved in litigation who has actually gone on vacation and not done a significant amount of work during the “week off.”

The bottom line is that an attorney at the top of his or her game in the early 1980s was essentially married to a secretary who kept track of hundreds of pieces of paper, cranked out all necessary paperwork, and did all the filing and scheduling.  Today’s lawyer can do much of that work (though certainly not all of it) without a secretary.

Have computers and improve the quality of life for attorneys involved in litigation?  Absolutely.  Is there a cost?  It seems so, although it is worth it.  The cost is that we now pour much more information through our heads in a given day simply because we can do this.  Many of the hassles and inefficiencies of only a couple years ago allowed us some time during each day to slow down a bit because we had to slow down a bit.  Now, everything is instant, which allows for the possibility of making instant progress (or lots of instant errors, if you’re not careful).  Therefore, the practice of litigation now seems sped up and seems as though everything has higher stakes, minute by minute.

Do the risks mean that I would go back to the old days of practicing law without a computer?  Not on your life.  Case closed!

The story was published by the Washington Post:

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

For commentary see this post from Huffpo.

Lots of depictions of continent movement can be found here. PALEOMAP Project “is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years.”

Remember when you could throw a stone from Florida to Africa?  Check out a movable globe from the early Jurassic here.  See what the world will look like 250 million years from now here.  Many other animations are here.

Here’s a post summarizing the original versions of seven popular fairy tales. Some gory stuff, indeed:

What is creepier than kids, parents, evilness, sorceresses, wolves, and cannibalism? Before the stories were ripped from their horror roots, they were just right for scary, gory films. The early days of fairy tales weren’t all rosy cheeks and puckered, pouting lips; they had blood, flesh, and genuine frights.

Many of the gory elements have now been sanitized out of the original versions. Some of the gory elements of these stories remain, however.  Nonetheless, we read these problematic parts to our kids as though things like killing and eating other people don’t really mean what they plainly say. 

With practice, we humans have the ability to read things any way we choose.  Yes, with practice, these stories about violence, death and the horrid betrayal of children by their parents can be read to children without disclaimers as though they are appropriate to read to children without heavy disclaimers.

This de facto sanitation of fairy tales reminds me of a little “joke” I sometimes play on Catholic friends.  I tell them that I’ve learned that there is a church in the neighborhood that incorporates cannibalism into its ritual–that the participants are literally eating human flesh and drinking blood.  I suggest that the police should be called. Most of the time, the Catholics will look concerned or grossed out, not recognizing that I am describing their own religion, the Catholic Mass. 

Bring the kids on down and celebrate transubstantiational cannibalism each and every Sunday!  Sanitized cannibalism. For more on Catholic cannibalism, see my earlier post, Good Friday, Good Grief!

I would suggest this as the take away thought:  With enough repetition, almost anything can be made to seem normal.  

In the Bible, Noah is said to have collected animals two by two, to fill the Ark and save them from the flood, so here’s my question: how did he catch them? Oh, sure, catching a sloth might not be too tough, but how did Noah catch pairs of more difficult animals, like hippos, rhinos, lions, cheetas, eagles, etc.? Even today, it would take an army of well-trained biologists to find and capture pairs of every species on our planet. How did Noah manage it with just his family? And what about the animals that existed only on the undiscovered continents of North and South America — animals such as buffalos, pronghorn antelopes, llamas, poison-dart frogs, etc.? Exactly how did Noah get *them* on board his Ark when he didn’t even know they existed?

Here’s a heartwarming story  about some of the insanity that followed in the wake of 9/11.  We see this kind of thing all the time, in the news, on tv shows, in movies.  A mistake compounded into tragedy by the utter fear and panic induced under extreme conditions.  One could almost forgive the FBI for this given the circumstances, but the follow-up beggars understanding.

It’s not like this is rare.  In Myanmar, comedians get jailed for cracking wise about the government (I believe stand-up comedy is illegal there period).  In Cuba, it is fine to criticize the United States all you want, but if you point out that your own government (Castro’s) doesn’t exactly deliver what anyone might call freedom, you end up in jail or dead.  Threats to national security the world over are never treated as anything less than the active presence of the devil or Darth Vader.  (Of course, in most cases Darth Vader is the one in charge, so…)

We, however, have no excuse.  Now, the courts did let this man go.  But then they sought to eradicate the public statements of what really happened.  The coercion was seen as something we must not admit happened.

So what’s worse?  Embarrassment or a violation of individual rights?  Because that is what all this has in common.  Governments seeking at all costs to avoid being embarrassed.

You might think that this should be a no-brainer.  If you want not to be embarrassed, don’t do anything embarrassing–i.e. don’t do anything stupid.  But governing is a large, complex, messy endeavor, and those who govern, after all, are humans (usually) who are prone to all the failures of our organism.  Things that look like a “good idea at the time” can turn out very much badly.

And the truth is, we still depend on Face in international relations.  This is silly as well, but unfortunately very true.  The appearance of a dignified, competent national government carries weight in negotiations.  It also carries weight with the people being represented.  After all, who wants to grant power to a buffoon?

I think, however, this part of the Emperor’s wardrobe.  Nations tacitly accept that they must avoid embarrassment on the home front in order to be credible to the rest of the world, but is there any validity to the presumption?  Between individuals, the ability to admit mistakes and laugh at oneself is seen—usually—as a virtue.  Somehow, once we go up the ladder into the realms of government, that virtue becomes intolerable.

So the FBI gets the wrong address, busts in on a family in its bed, makes a mess of the home, and finds out later that this really wasn’t a safe house for drug dealers/terrorists/counterfeiters/kidnappers/what have you.  Would it destroy them to say “We’re sorry” and perhaps offer some compensation for the inconvenience?  Instead they adamantly behave as it a trick had been played on them and that the FBI is the victim.

This is supposed to be a democracy.  This is supposed to be where the government works for Us.  When someone I hire screws up a job, I do not apologize to them or tolerate the suggestion that it was my fault they did it wrong.  In fact, while I might be inclined to overlook the mistake in the first instance, such arrogance would get them summarily fired.

It might do for all of us–right or left, it doesn’t matter–to bear in mind one simple fact about our leaders.

They are employees.

The president of the United States is indeed the most powerful single national leader on the planet.  He (perhaps soon she) wields power and authority unlike no king in history.  The burden and complexity of the office are crushing and we have seen men go in fairly vigorous and come out white-haired and, sometimes, broken (Johnson comes to mind; the job arguably killed Roosevelt and both Wilson and Eisenhower were damaged in office); those who gain the office deserve respect and perhaps a little admiration.  But at the end of the day, they are not My Country—they are an employee.

And if that’s the case for the president, it is even more so for everyone else down the chain.

So if a government official does something stupid, well, let’s see about making sure that doesn’t happen again.  If, however, they then proceed to act as if I have no right to bring them up short for their mistakes, then it’s time to fire them.

Because all too often the consequences of trying to squelch the public exposure of an embarrassment are far worse than the initial mistake.  After all, this isn’t Myanmar.

Is it?

As reported by The Raw Story, the U.S. is hemorhaging money into it’s Middle East adventures.  The numbers are staggering:

The United States is spending about $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to new estimates that show the wars will cost about $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

More than one-fourth of the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan — $705 billion — will go to paying interest on the wars’ costs, which are being funded with borrowed dollars, according to an estimate to be released Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office. Iraq accounts for about 80 percent of the costs with a $1.9 trillion tab, including $564 million in interest, a House budget committee staff director told USA Today, which reported the numbers Wednesday morning.

“The number is so big, it boggles the mind,” Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) told the newspaper.

The CBO previously estimated the war’s costs at $1.6 trillion, which did not include interest payments or Bush’s latest request for an extra $46 billion in war funding.

Back home, bridges are crumbling, students have trouble getting student loans and we allegedly can’t afford to have universal health coverage for children.  Therefore, more than ever, Iraq is a domestic issue.

It’s not any of the huge problems we face. In other words, it’s not peak oil. It’s not the way deficit spending and the trade deficit are destroying the economy. It’s not that so many young minds are being trashed by something that passes for “education” when it is actually a wierd combination of warehousing children and filling their heads with useless factoids.   It’s not the occupation of Iraq.  It’s not that the U.S. government has been almost totally purchased by huge corporations.  It’s not that we spy on each other and that we torture in the name of freedom.   It’s not that people spout religious nonsense rather than working together to solve real world challenges. It’s none of these things. 

Rather, my fear is that the citizens (including the citizens that still care) no longer have the capacity to have meaningful public conversations with our “leaders.”   We all know that our politicians talk one way in public yet behind closed doors they must talk another way.  They must talk some other way with their closest friends and advisers.  It would be too disturbing to think otherwise.  And yet we must deal with the way they talk to and at us.  But there is no productive way of dealing with this.  Words have become cheap because they are untied to the things and people real world.  We talk at each other instead of trying to change things for the better.   We’d rather stand around claiming that we “care” than doing anything that takes us from our amusements.

And because we can no longer dialogue with our national leaders in public, we no longer have the capacity to truly address any of those problems in the first paragraph.  This will continue as long as we allow ourselves to remain divided into huge camps that distrust each other so much more than we distrust ourselves.  We are divided almost equally these days.  We are thus hopelessly incapacitated as a country.  We are stalemated against each other; we are the personification of Burriden’s Ass. 

And there’s no help on the way, at least for the time being.  We seem to be incapable of learning until we actually feel the pain for the decisions we are making for running this country.  And that pain seems to be on the way for many of us.  When that day comes, when we realize that we are responsible for our own predicament, we might be reduced to prayer and hope.  Even those of us who don’t believe in prayer or hope. 

Let us hope that we can start learning little lessons from our pain before we so utterly wreck our way of life that the natural consequences of our irresponsibility, the waves of insurmountable pain, make permanent wretched fools of us all.

How long should you let them string you along unproductively before hanging up and trying again?

The trick to using tech support over the phone is to quickly size up whether the alleged tech support expert on the other end of the line actually knows anything.  If not, think of a reason to end the call.  Any reason.  Then call back and you’ll likely get another person.  My recent experiences confirmed the wide disparity in competence among those who allegedly do tech support.  I’ve learned my lesson, I think.   I need to stop being too patient.  I’ve renouced my willingness to sit there waiting for the “expert” to flip through endless knowledge base screens, for instance.

This weekend was a long weekend, tech-support-speaking.  I needed to help my mother install a router and help her set up her new HP notebook computer.  I assumed that these tasks would take about an hour, so I allowed myself three hours.  As it turned out, it took about six hours.  Plus, I had tech support issues of my own when I got back home. Things often aren’t what they purport to be when it comes to upgrading and improving one’s gadgetry. 

The Linksys router came with lots of warnings: “Insert CD-ROM first.”  So that’s what I did.  I put the disk into my mom’s old desktop computer and followed the instructions meticulously until I came upon a screen that requested a lot of information I didn’t have or didn’t understand.  By that point, the router was already broadcasting all over the house, so I tried to skip the screen, although the software would not allow it.  Therefore, I exited the program, which caused the broadcasting to stop.  I then called Linksys tech support. 

If there is one thing more difficult than talking to the tech support person you can’t understand (because he pronounces words differently than you do) it’s dealing with the tech support person who talks so softly that you can’t hear him at all PLUS has a heavy accent.  That’s the sort of fellow I was dealing with on Saturday.  He tried his hardest, but it became obvious that he had no idea what he was doing.  He told me to unhook all the cabling, then go to the company website and follow the easy instructions.  The problem is that the unhooking of the cabling meant that I did not have Internet access any longer.  After about five minutes, he clarified himself that I should look up the desktop computer the way it was before I ever bought a router and then log on to the Linksys easy install portion of its website.

By the time it became clear that he was not competent, I had been on the phone with him for 30 minutes and my patience was running thin.  I eventually sensed that he had nothing to offer me other than telling me to check out his company’s website.  I was actually looking forward to hanging up the phone with him.  It was not out of a sense of personal animosity.  He was a friendly fellow and there is no doubt that he spoke English much better than I would ever be able to give tech support in any language other than English.  On the other hand, life is short, and I felt the grains of sand slipping away. He asked me to rate his call on a scale of one to five on the way out.  In all honesty, I would have had to give him the lowest grade, although I didn’t have the heart to do it in live time.  I told him that I was not able to evaluate the call until I tried out his advice, so I passed on the lifetime rating request.  I then logged on to the Linksys site and clicked on the link he had described.  Lo and behold, this easy install procedure did not apply to Windows 2000, the version on my mother’s desktop computer. (more…)

Oh, and they’re all named “Steve.”  It’s all part of “Project Steve,” begun in 2003.   These Steves are mostly biologists and they are mostly PhDs.  They are all highly qualified and the are each affiliated with highly reputable institutions.  They’ve all publicly agreed to this statement, in honor of Stephen J. Gould:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

Bob Cesca reports on the President’s attitude toward a war of mass destruction.  These are the actual words and emotional expressions of President Bush:

“But this — we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding [grinning] World War III [end grinning], it seems like you [begin giggling] ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge [end giggling] necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

This article by Dave Brichous sums up the components our our National Faith. These components, considered together, constitute our “patriotized history”:

Rather than telling the truth about U.S. actions in other people’s countries, mainstream media present us with a false picture, a patriotized history. In this imaginary world, U.S. actions have the same five characteristics regardless of place or time. They are: 

-self-sacrificing (not for selfish U.S. interests) 
-benevolent (intended to help the people of the target country) 
-self-defensive (never aggressive) 
-freedom-pushing (trying to force others to be democracies) 
-legal (possessed of legitimate authority) 

We can call these five the core myths of patriotized history. Events and facts from real history that show U.S. behavior as opposite to these five myths get removed or redefined as their own opposites, so that the message, the meaning conveyed by the texts, always conforms to them. 

Brichous’ article contains numerous observations regarding the way the media manipulates these alleged qualities.  His article is a clinic in learning how to recognize dys-information.  What are some of the specific techniques used by the media?

One reason patriotized history is so powerful is that it is rarely delivered directly. A lie is most vulnerable when it is held up for examination as an explicit claim. This encourages listeners to consider whether they agree or not, whether they know enough to agree or disagree, and even to do some research and find out the facts. By contrast, if the lie is slipped into the conversation as if it were something we all already know to be true and agree upon as a matter of course, it is likely to go unchallenged. It is even more convincing if it is the implied, but unspoken message. Strongest of all is if it is implied in the negative, by its absence. 

This entire article is well-written and well-considered.  It should be required reading for anyone who considers ever reading any newspaper.  Truly.

Perhaps the rule should be that countries that don’t show the utmost care for nuclear weapons shouldn’t be allowed to have any.  Oops, that’s us, according to the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force said Friday it has punished 70 airmen involved in the accidental, cross-country flight of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber following an investigation that found widespread disregard for the rules on handling such munitions.

“There has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and Barksdale Air Force Base,” said Maj. Gen. Richard Newton, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations.

Newton was announcing the results of a six-week probe into the Aug. 29-30 incident in which the B-52 was inadvertently armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana without anyone noticing the mistake for more than a day.

The missiles were supposed to be taken to Louisiana, but the warheads were supposed to have been removed beforehand.

Michael Mukasey doesn’t get it, as explained by Glenn Greenwald:

And when he was asked yesterday explicitly whether he would advise the President that he has the power to “seize U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and detain them indefinitely without charge?,” all he would say in response was: “I certainly can’t say as of now there is clear authority authorizing what I thought there was authority to authorize in Padilla” (a concession he made grudgingly, only after claiming it was an “open” question and only after he made a series of legal arguments as to why the President does have that power).

The very idea that a nominee for U.S. Attorney General is explicitly open to the possibility that the President can indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens on U.S. soil with no charges is unfathomable. That is the most extreme, un-American and tyrannical power that exists. And yet, not only does his answer trigger virtually no mention by our media, it is almost certain that Mukasey will be confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate without a ripple. That is why there is no higher priority than forcing attention on these issues and supporting and rewarding those rare instances of meaningful action — such as Dodd’s today — in defense of the rule of law and our basic constitutional liberties.

Is Greenwald being too hard on the corporate media?  Consider today’s front page headline of the feckless St. Louis Post Dispatch:  “Nominee objects to use of torture.” Are they forgetting that disgraced Alberto Gonzales also claimed to be against torture? Readers of the local St. Louis Paper baselessly assuming that Mukasey is actually going to pay attention to the Constitution when there is firm evidence that he doesn’t care about the Constitution.

Addendum:  The NYT reports on the actual testimony regarding one clear form of torture:

“Is waterboarding constitutional?” Mr. Mukasey was asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, in one of the sharpest exchanges.

“I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

Mr. Whitehouse described Mr. Mukasey’s response as a “massive hedge” since the nominee refused to be drawn into a conversation about whether waterboarding amounted to torture; many lawmakers from both parties, as well as civil liberties and human rights groups, have said it is clearly a form of torture. The administration has suggested that it ended the practice after protests from Capitol Hill and elsewhere, although it has never said so explicitly.

“I mean, either it is or it isn’t,” Mr. Whitehouse continued.

Waterboarding, he said, “is the practice of putting somebody in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning. Is that constitutional?”

Mr. Mukasey again demurred, saying, “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”

Mr. Whitehouse said he was “very disappointed in that answer; I think it is purely semantic.”