According to Reuters:  Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.

I have the privilege of working in an 15th floor office with a view.   Most people with offices downtown wouldn’t consider my view to be a great view (because I can’t see the Arch or the baseball stadium from my window), but it’s interesting enough that most people who come to my office look out the window and comment about what they can see.   Even though my window is north-facing, I get some sunlight (there’s no tall buildings butted right up to my building).

What’s interesting to me is that I actually took the time to notice my view today and I was reminded that it is a interesting and worthy view, in an urban downtown sort of way.  You can see lots of activity on the street.  People walking about.  You can see serious construction activity in the old buildings where new lofts are being carved out.   During the day, hundreds of people walk the streets of St. Louis downtown.  Due to the increasing number of lofts, we have a noticable increase in night-time foot traffic too.  You can now see lots of people walking dogs after work.  That was a rare site a few years ago.  More and more restaurants are now opening. 

Again, what is interesting to me today is that I had to make myself take the time to look.  I spend hundreds of hours in this office every month and I don’t think I’ve taken the time to consciously look out my window for many weeks, perhaps months.  

Many of us get so very busy that we get tunnel-vision.  And it almost gets crazy.  It gets to the point where, if you want to do something–anything at all, even something fun–you need to put it on your Outlook calendar.  Maybe I should put a recurring event on Outlook each month:  “Look out your window to see what there is to be seen.”  Sounds like good therapy. 

It makes me wonder what else I’m not paying attention to.  

Today is/was Leap Day, or that extra day wedged into the Intercalary Year to fudge for God not having created a year with a whole number of days to help keep things straight. I received an email from a friend asking how often does Leap Day come on a Friday? I’m used to fielding odd math questions.

Anyway, the answer is every 28 years, ignoring century years not divisible by 400. I first got that by running the year cursor forward on the Windows clock setting window. Then I worked out why this is.

Look at any 4 year period. It has exactly 1,461 days, or 208 weeks plus 5 days. Again, unless it crosses a non-leap century year (like 2100). So every leap year the day of the week moves back by 5 days. How many ⁵/₇ ths does it take to get back to a whole number? Yep, seven. So 4 year periods by 7 cycles is 28 years.

What about Sadie Hawkin’s Day? November 19th, and has been since Al Capp invented it in 1937. But Leap Day is the date on which it is traditionally acceptable (in English tradition) for a woman to propose to a man. Thus the confusion.

Would you like to listen to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens discussing religion for two hours?  My initial impulse was that I wasn’t especially interested, even though I admire these thinkers/writers and I agree with many of their ideas.  My hesitation was that I was already quite familiar with their works.

I jumped in, though, and watched the video (it’s hosted at Richard Dawkins’ site).  I was delighted with this material.  This video is well worth watching,  whether or not you’ve read any of the participants’ books.  Each of these four participants is well known for writing a book that challenges religious beliefs.  In this video, they often move beyond the eloquent arguments they have made in writing and, instead, they address many aspects of the psychology of belief, the psychology of argument and where we should go from here.  The session is filled with memorable anecdotes and personal reflections. 

It is true that Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have much in common.   But there are also a surprising number of points where they diverge in their thinking.  When they diverge, they do it with mutual respect, and the discussion moves well all the way through. 

Some of my favorite topics:

What preachers think in private (whether they “know better” than to preach the way they do).

Whether it’s ever possible for a rational argument to succeed regarding a devout believer.

The type of faith we have in scientists and other types of experts.

The arrogance of those who claim to speak for God.

Those who are noumenous (those who experience a secular sense of mystery) versus those who claim religious beliefs.

That each of the participants enjoys having a Christmas Tree during the holiday season.

Sophisticated theology characterized as “stamp collecting.”

That well-educated believers somehow succeed in keeping “two sets of books.”

Are there some absolutely true things that responsible people shouldn’t investigate and shouldn’t promulgate?

What are atheists missing when they coldly dismiss religious beliefs, out of hand?

The problem with those who live lives of perpetual distraction.

Whether the participants would prefer a world in which churches were always empty.

The connection between religion and art.

Whether one can lose one’s self in religious stories without actually believing them to be true.

The discussions of these topics will often surprise you.  Don’t make my mistake and presume that you could have written the script. 

In the January 31, 2008 edition of Nature, author Dan Jones reviews what evolution indicates about human killing humans.  As with many human behaviors, the evolutionists divide on whether killing of other humans is an adaptation (a change in organisms that allows them to live more successfully in an environment) or a “byproduct of urges toward some other goal.”  There are intriguing arguments for both sides. 

Some have suggested that individual murder is more likely a byproduct, whereas organized violence (such as the type we see in wars) is more often an adaptation.  What is the biological evidence pointing to something other than byproduct?  A 1997 study found that “the average volume of the orbitofrontal cortex between men and women accounts for about half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes.” Combine this with Jane Goodall’s observations of gang violence in chimpanzees, where “the adult males of one community systematically attacked and killed the males of another group over a period of years, with the victorious group eventually absorbing the remaining victims.” 

It is incredibly hard to weed out the cultural factors from the biological, of course.  Here’s something I found interesting.  Interpersonal attacks leading to death have declined dramatically over the past few centuries.

After rising from an average of 32 homicides per 100,000 people per year in the 13th and 14th centuries to 41 in the 15th, the murder rate has steadily dropped in every subsequent century, 21.9, 11, 3.2, 2.6 and finally 1.4 in the 20th century.

Not that anyone is suggesting that human biological evolution could account for this decline in human killings.  This period of eight centuries is much too short a time period for evolution to have had any meaningful effect.  (more…)

One out of every 99 American adults lives in a prison cell, according to a new Pew study.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world . . . .

The report said the United States is the world’s incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

George Carlin is preparing for another HBO special, this one on “not giving a #%&@.”  Carlin was recently interviewed by Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky.  I’d recommend signing up for Salon’s Premium membership, to give you access to Carlin’s full interview [Salon Premium is $29/year, with lots of extras thrown in].  Here’s Carlin discussing what went wrong with humanity, in a nutshell:

[L]eading into the ’90s, I divorced myself from any stake in the human adventure or the American adventure. That sounds kind of pompous so let me just break that down. What I decided was that I didn’t give a fuck about what happens on this planet to these people. I mean, I see the nice things in people, I see the good things, but I also see what a depraved, sick species we are, the only species that kills its own for personal gain.

I’ll go back to square one on this: We squandered a lot of gifts. Human beings were given a lot of great gifts. We were given the ability to reason, this extra-large brain, walking erect, having binocular vision and the opposable thumb, and all of these things, and we had such promise, but we squandered it on goods and superstition. We gave ourselves over to the high priests and the traders, and they are the ones we allow to control us. I think that’s a huge mistake and it’s disappointing to me. Now, the corollary is, America was given great gifts, this ideal form of government, this most improved form of self-government that has ever come along up until that time, and we squandered it. And once again, on the same two things: gizmos and toys and gadgets — goods, property, possessions — and also this country is far too religious for its own good.

. . . I don’t feel cynical — I feel more like a skeptic and a realist — but, if cynical I am, they have said that if you scratch a cynic you’ll find a disappointed idealist.

The answer is we don’t know.  

I don’t know.  You don’t know.   No one knows.   That’s it.   Off with you . . .  [I figured that this title would draw some Bible-toting fundies to the site].

So you can all leave now.  There’s nothing here to discuss.  Go visit some other blog post.  Have a nice long life, because at the end of your life, you’ll likely just be dead.  You know, you’ll be

blooey, breathless, buried, cadaverous, checked out, cold, cut off, deceased, defunct, departed, done for, erased, expired, extinct, gone, inanimate, inert, late, lifeless, liquidated, mortified, no more, not existing, offed, passed away, perished, reposing, rubbed out, snuffed out, spiritless, stiff, unanimated, washed up and wasted.

There is no reason to think that any dead person has ever been aware of anything at all.  

I’ll admit that it is possible that at the moment you die, your consciousness will continue.  Maybe you’ll instantly be transported to the far side of the moon to ride a sparkly majestic merry-go-round after you’re dead, but there’s no evidence for that or any other version of continued sentience.  The only evidence is that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There’s nothing more we can say about it.  There’s no credible report that anyone has returned from the dead to say otherwise.   You didn’t listen; I said “credible.”

. . .  Oh, I see some of you are still hanging around because you can’t accept ”I don’t know” for an answer.   I once wrote a post for you guys.   Well, try this.  Just look in a mirror, take a deep breath and say it slowly:  “I don’t know what it’s like to be dead.”  [Bonus points for anyone who can say: “No one else knows either, even that angry guy who preaches on Sunday”].

Sorry, I don’t have the patience to listen to you telling me that you have been raised to read an old self-contradictory “sacred” book with it’s obscure claims that there is life after death.  Don’t take things on faith! (where did we ever get the idea that taking things on faith was admirable?) Based on what we actually know, there’s simply no evidence of life after death (except for “shelf life,” which is the amount of time that passes before your corpse starts stinking).  

Of course, you can fantasize that there is life after death.  If you go to this site, you can even have some fun making your own epitaph.  Or check out this incredible photo of a soul entering an embryo.  But pretending any of these crazy things, doesn’t make any of them true.

Science has shown us that the brain is an important part of what enables humans to think.  When the brain works, there can be thinking.   When neurons die, there is less mental function.  When the brain stops working entirely, there isn’t any thinking.  Ask any neurologist.  It’s that simple.   (more…)

Was it Comcast?  Whoever it was, this tactic is disgusting.

There was huge turnout at [the Feb 25] public hearing in Boston on the future of the Internet. Hundreds of concerned citizens arrived to speak out on the importance of an open Internet. Many took the day off from work — standing outside in the Boston cold — to see the FCC Commissioners. But when they reach the door, they’re told they couldn’t come in.

Are they gone?  Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone?  Good.  Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:

Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.

Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants?   After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect.  Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.”  Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.

In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed.  In fact, Lilly makes this claim:

The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than 3,500 publications on PROZAC in medical/scientific journals.

It’s that three thousand five hundred and EIGHTEENTH publication (or whatever) that gets you every time, especially when the full data set is finally made available.   

But enough attacking of soul-less pharmaceutical companies.  Well, almost enough.  Forty million people paying good money to use this stuff?  Egads!  Kirsh and colleagues sum it up for me when they say:  “This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported.”  Ouch.  I could sum up this quote in my own way, using richly deserved expletives aimed at Big Pharma, but this is a family site, so I’ll refrain.  Instead, I’ll simply disclose a new creative spelling for Lilly:  L-A-W-S-U-I-T.

But now, the irresponsible news media has blown it too, and the news about these depressingly ineffective drugs is now available to the public at large.   Because the media has reported that the effect of Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone is mostly due to the placebo effect, there won’t be any more placebo effect, at least for those people who saw the news and who understand the placebo effect.

Therefore, please keep your non-severely depressed friends away from the news media for the next several days.  If they accidently see that the placebo effect is the main effect of Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone, they won’t be able to take those drugs any more to counter their mild depressions. (more…)

Earlier this week, the AP reporter Nedra Pickler published an odious story that questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism through insinuation. The entire focus of the story was to imply that Sen. Obama may not be sufficiently patriotic to be president because he doesn’t wear an American flag pin, and because he supposedly didn’t put his hand over his heart during a recent singing of the National Anthem. (No, really.)

The article used what are now standard tricks in the playbook of a hollow and degraded media: using the “some say” technique to pass on right-wing innuendo as if it were serious news, making sure to give “equal time” to rumors and facts, and focusing obsessively on utterly irrelevant trivialities to the exclusion of legitimate and important issues. (Haircuts, anyone?) Until recently, Obama hadn’t been the presumptive nominee, and the media-abetted right-wing attacks had focused mainly on Hillary Clinton. But as he increasingly takes on frontrunner status, it was inevitable that some of this slime would start coming his way.

I’ve written before about why I didn’t intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary (and I didn’t), but I was equivocal about Obama. His voting record is all-around solid progressive; what I was more concerned about was the way he’d handle himself in the general election. Any Democratic presidential candidate is sure to face a barrage of vicious personal attacks. Unlike Clinton - whose voting record I’ve expressed my discontent with, but whose willingness to defend herself was not an issue - Obama seemed more of an unknown quantity to me. Too many Democrats have lost elections by being timid in the face of Republican attacks, running away from their own positions or failing to defend themselves when criticized - or, worse, trying to deflect criticism by aping Republican positions. (A tip to Democratic politicians: When given a choice between real Republican and Republican-lite, conservatives vote for the real thing, and liberals don’t vote.) This incident was one of the first tests of how Obama would handle himself under pressure.

Today Obama responded, and I was extremely pleased to see that he seems to understand very well the game being played here:

“A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.”

Yes, yes, yes! This is the kind of response I’ve been waiting for so long to hear from a progressive politician - one that doesn’t tacitly concede the principle behind the Republican attack, that doesn’t try to deflect it by acting more like them, but one that exposes their hypocrisy and takes the fight to them on their own turf. I’ve always firmly believed that Democrats could win elections in a landslide if they stopped running away from the mere whiff of criticism and started boldly and fearlessly standing up for what they’re supposed to believe in. There’s ample ground to take the fight to the enemy, as Obama’s response shows.

Given the outrageous injustices that have ensued when the Republicans are in power, the blatant and shameless way they sought and still seek to frighten the public and violate the Constitution for their own political benefit, they’ve given us more than enough rope to hang them with. They are defenseless on weak ground, which is why they attack constantly. But we need a candidate who will point this out, who will make the case with fervor and passion, and who will not be cowed by pathetic attacks from the right-wing rumor mill. After today, I’m far more hopeful that Obama could be that candidate.

At the supermarket last week, I picked up a copy of the Sun.  Actually, I think the full title of the newspaper is Sun: God Bless America, based upon the front cover. I was intrigued by the front page headline: “Seven Miracle Prophecies That Will Come True on Easter Sunday.”  I wondered what those prophecies were, and now I’m going to share them with you so you don’t have to spend your hard earned money on the Sun: God Bless America.

It’s going to be quite a day this Easter Sunday, that’s for sure.  Based on reading the lead article in the Sun: God Bless America, I now know that the following things will be happening on March 23, 2008:

• 1.  George W. Bush will announce that all of our troops will be coming home from Iraq, and that the Iraq government will take over full responsibility for Iraq’s security. 
• 2.  There will be numerous miraculous healings all over the world, including people with cancer, heart disease and arthritis.  People will rejoice and no one will have to live in despair any longer.
• 3.  Pollution will miraculously reverse itself.  In fact, according to the article, the levels of pollution will all return to where they were before the Industrial Revolution.  The authority for the statement is “Professor Jonas Peake, an authority on Biblical prophecy at Britain’s famed Cambridge University.”
• 4.  Congress and the White House will pour lots of that money that was destined for Iraq into the Social Security fund, resulting in a doubling of benefits for every American.
• 5.  Delegates from all the nuclear powers will meet at the United Nations and agree to destroy all of their nuclear weapons.
• 6.  The rapture will begin.  A few people will actually be raptured on Easter Sunday, which will be “the beginning of a worldwide miracle of salvation.”
• 7.  Jesus Christ will appear in a blinding blaze of light.  He will come to deliver a simple message that we should admit our sins and beg for His forgiveness.

As I was reading this paper, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of people actually read this crap (other than me, of course-and I’m an armchair anthropologist).  As bizarre as the lead article was, the “Sun: God Bless America” is filled with other curious claims.  (more…)

I love being a recruiter as a way to make a living. It is a fantastic mix of detective work, rapport building, conflict resolution, understanding and differentiation. In our new information age I can do it from anywhere, and that is just cool as it can be. My career fits me well, and I find it immensely rewarding when things go well, and probably learn even more when they do not.

I left my company and went out on my own because I felt like like my life was terribly out of balance. Yes part of it was the oppressive and abusive atmosphere coupled with the rampant disrespect, but all of that negativity really just made me more aware that I was following a path that wasn’t consistent with how I wanted to live. I found myself dreaming of a life where where kindness, compassion, and mutual respect formed the ground rules and, ultimately, where I could feel like I “made a difference” to the world as a whole. That life looked so far away from what I was living that it seemed like a fairy tale. When I stopped and looked at the distance between the life I was living and the life I wanted, I got scared. I also got busy figuring out a way to escape. It is not that I am against working smart and making money. I had that discussion with myself years and years ago, and I decided then that I can do more for the world with some cash than without it. But the truth was I was exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally from an environment that had become combative and very dark. I wasn’t doing anything for myself, not to mention anyone else.

When I left this past October I wasn’t at all prepared for the fireworks, especially because I had tried to do everything in the most positive manner I could imagine. I didn’t realize escaping would be so painful and difficult and infuriating, and I was shattered in a lot of ways. I felt like I had stepped off a cliff and couldn’t catch my breath. I realized I had walked away from a lucrative position with no money coming in and a whole lot going out. I was depressed and beat up before, but now I was was terrified. (more…)

Marty Kaplan, a research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, repeatedly raises important points relating to our dysfunctional news media. He posted today on his ambivalence with the recently announced candidacy of Ralph Nader.

Nader, who skipped the primaries, says that his third-party race will inject into the fall campaign issues like single-payer health insurance, labor law reform, Pentagon waste, corporate crime, “the illegal occupation of Palestine,” and impeachment — issues he says Clinton, Obama, and McCain have taken off the table…

It’s a shame that to get five minutes of the nation’s civic attention, a person has to either be a billionaire, or to raise and spend a billion of other people’s dollars, or to do something as potentially lethal the country’s ultimate well-being as to mount a quixotic run for president. Maybe we already possess the communications technology for a modern-day Tom Paine to reframe the national political debate without at the same time landing another George W. Bush in the White House. The irony is that the candidate most likely to focus on the barriers to success standing in the way of that technology — the concentrated, corporate control of the media — is the same Ralph Nader whose presence in the race may turn out to cast the darkest shadow on its outcome.

This fellow claims to have lots of important statistics displayed on a big real-time dashboard.   Assuming his data to be accurate (I don’t have any reason to dispute it), it’s especially interesting to hit the “Now” button to reset this “World Clock,” then to watch the numbers grow from zero.  

Though I’ve often discussed world oil depletion, I’m amazed to see the number of barrels of oil pumped every minute.  

[Warning: This Post is rated "R" for Rant] 

I’ve been to several Trivia Nights, so I do have some basis for opining on this topic. It’s time that I made my feelings absolutely clear: I do not like trivia nights.  I don’t see the point of trivia nights.  Trivia Nights are things that keep people from having good conversations. I will explain further.

I understand that Trivia Nights are often held to raise money for good causes.  I don’t have any problem with raising money for good causes.  Actually, I would happily pay a reasonable sum of money in order to not have to sit through another Trivia Night.  I will pay my fair share to help raise that money for that good cause, as long as I don’t have to attend Trivia Night.

I should also make it clear that I sometimes enjoy trivia.  Occasionally, I find myself reading a list of trivia questions, the kind of list where I can immediately check the answer.  In that way, I can review dozens of questions per minute, until I’ve had my fill of trivia (which is usually a minute or two). Not a bad diversion, once in awhile.

What I don’t like, however, is an intentional onslaught of slow-motion trivia.  Trivia Nights consist of intentional onslaughts of slow-motion trivia.  Each question is read slowly to a room filled with dozens tables that are each filled with people.  The tables compete against each other.  Each question is simultaneously considered for a minute or two by all the people in attendance, the participants of each table whispering to each other in order to strategize or to determine whether they know the answer. They also whisper to make sure that the nearby tables don’t overhear the ostensibly correct answer. Once in awhile, a table of people can deduce a correct answer or at least make an educated guess.  Equally often, however, someone at the table immediately knows the answer or no one knows the answer.  When no one at the table knows the answer (or even if someone does know the answer), it is everyone’s job to consume some of the massive offerings of food and drinks at the table. Thus is process of Trivia Night, which involves the reading of as many as 100 questions. What kinds of questions?  Here are some samples of the kinds of questions you’d actually have to deal with at a Trivia Night:

• What was the year Ferguson Jenkins was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame?
• Name the song that was used in a love scene in the film Top Gun.
• State the name of the actress who appeared in both of Bill Cosby’s TV shows.
• What is the difference between an American roulette wheel and a European roulette wheel?
• State the exact number of Republican Party Presidents there have been.
• What was the nickname of alleged Philadelphia mobster Joey Merlino.
• What was Eddie Haskell’s mother’s name on the 1960s TV show “Leave it to Beaver.”
• What is the third longest river in Australia?

As far as I’m concerned, the answer to each of these questions is I don’t know and I don’t care.  Why don’t I care?  Because these topics are trivial.  That these topics are trivial means that they are not important.  Things that are not important should not be the focus of long fundraising sessions, unless those sessions are fun.  For me, answering 100 slow-motion trivia questions over four hours is not fun. Why is it not fun?  Because these topics are trivial (etc.). (more…)

I often notice left-handedness, perhaps because I am a left-hander.  A few days ago, while watching a video of the most recent Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama debate, I noticed that Barack Obama was left-handed (he was taking notes with his left hand).   That video reminded me that Bill Clinton was also a leftie. 

After reading this ABC News article, I was reminded that Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were also left-handed (George W. Bush is right-handed).  The same article indicates that John McCain is also left-handed.   So is John Edwards.

Pretty startling statistic, given the fact that only about 10% of people are left handed.  The ABC News article suggests an explanation:

Scientists and historians agree that being left-handed, which is often associated with outside-the-box thinking, can be a political strength.

Robert Burton has writen a book entitled On Being Certain:  Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.   I haven’t read this book yet, but the topic Burton raises is a compelling topic to me (I called my prior post “I don’t know”). 

Here’s the thesis from Burton’s web site:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” are sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason.

Burton is a neuroscientist who has explored the roots of conviction.  He argues that the feeling of being correct does not spring from conscious thought and reasoning.   It sounds like Burton is arguing that the gut feeling of being correct is more akin to an emotion.  

Sounds right to me.  I’m putting Burton’s book on my reading list.

Perhaps a topic this important merits one-billionth of one percent of the research budget of the CIA or Department of the Defense, wouldn’t you think?  I’d require that all politicians take a seminar on this topic before making a single decision. 

I subscribe to Funny Times, a monthly humor publication filled with cartoons and humorous essays.  I consider it great bang for the buck, at a cost of about two dollars per issue.

In the March 2008 edition of Funny Times, Phil Proctor compiled some stunning statistics in his column (he calls his column “Planet Proctor”).  The context of his recent column is that the mother of two of his friends was born 99 years ago.  What was the U.S. like when she was born?  Here’s a sampling:

The average life expectancy in the US was 47 years.  Only 14% of the homes in the US had a bathtub.  Only 8% had a telephone.  A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.  There were only 8,000 cars in the US and only 144 miles of paved roads. . . . . Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Tennessee were each more heavily populated in California. . .  the population of Las Vegas, Nevada was 30 . . . More than 95% of all births in the US took place at home.  90% of all US physicians had no college education. . . Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.  Crossword puzzles, canned beer and iced tea hadn’t been invented. . .  the American flag had 45 stars. . . . There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. . . There were only about 230 reported murders in the entire US. . . Marijuana, heroin and morphine were all available over the counter at corner drugstores.

The Wall Street Journal has published a short article commemorating the book in which psychologist Howard Gardner announced his theory of the ”multiple intelligences”: Frames of Mind (1983).   [I'd recommend starting with Gardner's 2000 sequel: Intelligence Reframed].

This WSJ article is light-hearted, though it makes some serious points along the way.   It reads as though the writer had an epiphany when he finally realized that multiple intelligence theory does not hold that every child is a genius.  Gardner’s theory doesn’t hold that all children are equally capable.  Rather, MI theory holds that there are many ways to measure intelligence (at least nine major ways, according to Gardner) and that these multiple intelligences don’t meaningfully meld into any sort of all-purpose single score.  Gardner’s main point is that the traditional alleged all-purpose intelligence rating (think of the score of an old-fashioned IQ test) that many educators have traditionally labelled general intelligence is a real world fiction that stigmatizes many children who are brilliant in many ways that society values highly, though they might not excel at math or reading.

In sum, there are a variety of ways in which children (and adults) excel or flounder, and we are better off recognizing a reality-based multi-scale spectrum rather than jamming all of our children under a single scale that measures only few of the well-substantiated intelligences recognized by Gardner:

[Gardner] noted that, while some parents might recoil from an intelligence theory that brings so many into the fold, others might dislike that it opens up new vistas in which their children prove to be below average. I hadn’t thought about that. Contrary to popular misperception, Mr. Gardner explained, MI [multiple intelligence] theory doesn’t mean that every child is outstanding at something. Some children can be below average at everything. My heart sank. . .  Alas, here was the kindly Harvard psychology professor hinting that, while there are more avenues to genius, there are also more opportunities to prove oneself stupid.

[Note:  There is an excellent grade school in my city (St. Louis, Missouri) that utilizes a curriculum based on Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory:  New City School. ]

The great Leonard Cohen with the equally great Sonny Rollins and gospel-inspired backup.

This is basically Leonard Cohen’s version of the Rosh Hashanah prayer Unetaneh Toker:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

(from the Orthodox Union web site)

Guilt and Pleasure magazine quotes Cohen as deriving the song “from the melody which I heard when I was sat in a synagogue. And of course the ending of my song is something different. ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ This is my kind of prayer: who is it, or what is it, which determines man’s life?”

Would the world be a better place if young Leonard had been spared the “child abuse” of hearing this prayer in synagogue? Who knows?

The “plagiarism” charge died last night. Actually, it was already dead. But maybe, just maybe, Hillary Clinton finally realizes it. During her debate with Barack Obama, when she pulled out her well-rehearsed plagiarism charge she was greeted with a bit of applause, then a shower of boos by the audience. As reported by the Associated Press, Obama has sometimes used speech lines similar to those used by Massachusetts Governor Devel Patrick (who is also the national co-chairperson of Obama’s campaign).

But is it really improper (as Ms. Clinton has charged) for anyone to use the unattributed ideas of a third party (in this case Deval Patrick) who gave you complete permission to use those ideas? Mr. Obama and Mr. Patrick both agree that Obama had Patrick’s blessing to use these ideas in Obama’s speeches.

Patrick, a friend and supporter of Obama, said he encouraged the candidate last week to respond to Clinton’s criticisms about his rhetoric, as he has done before. He said he shared lines from his 2006 campaign for governor with Obama’s speechwriters and wanted no credit, because the two men often swap ideas.

Using Hillary Clinton’s logic, she herself has acted improperly every time she has uttered any idea she got from her husband Bill without specifically attributing that idea to Bill. Or how about all of those bad ideas she’s been getting from her advisors? When her ideas fall flat (maybe especially when they fall flat) shouldn’t she make complete disclosures, saying “I got that bad idea from a highly paid political consultant named [Mary or Bob or Claude]? Using that same standard by which she has leveled “plagiarism” charges against Obama, Clinton has committed many thousands of her own violations during this campaign.

The bottom line is that we are trying to choose a President. Among all the candidates’ speeches, throughout this entire campaign, has there really been a single idea that has been truly original? I doubt it. The political platitudes we’ve heard this campaign are much like those we’ve been hearing for decades. I suspect, in fact that Devel Patrick, himself, was probably inspired by someone else when he first uttered the ideas later used by Barack Obama. Given this context of the history of political rhetoric, it is not hard to understand the boos Clinton received. Was she really unable to think of anything more urgent to discuss at the debate than her horribly strained accusation of “plagiarism?” If so, she’s out of worthy ideas.

Just one word - fabulous.

The first time I watched the video I thought, “What can you expect from a picture drawn with MS Paint?” But watch how it unfolds.

Other works of his that I also like: here or my personal choice for president. Or check out the videos where he paints with ketchup and french fries or chocolate syrup and a spoon. I also need to check out the videos where he teaches how to draw.

opsimath

Part of Speech:   noun
Definition:   a person who becomes a student or learner late in life
Etymology:   Greek ‘late in learning’

[from dictionary.com]

According to this article in Harpers, the Congressional elite include most of the members of Congress.   Consider this, for example:

Since 2005, at just ten of D.C.’s priciest restaurants, House membvers have spent more than $5.4 million of political funds.

The title to the article is “Beltway bacchanal: Congress lives high on the contributor’s dime.” 

I’m more concerned than ever that this well-entrenched and well-monied lobbyist-filled culture will repel most good-hearted citizens from ever wanting to serve in government.   Combine this repulsive culture with the threats that even good-hearted people would face if they dare ran for high public office, and it leaves you wondering how Congress is run by any well-motivated people at all.