I want to share with everyone a passage from the opening of the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. This silly 1980s movie provides a very oversimplified, idealized image of African Bushmen, but at the same time gets its label of modern westernized man spot-on. This excerpt from the film’s opening narration always makes me pause and consider the needless complexity of modern life:

“…Here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him.

So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But he didn’t know when to stop.

The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat.

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

For instance, if it’s Monday and 8:00 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings…and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 9:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 5 minutes…And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time…you adapt to new circumstances.

No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.”

Re-reading this part of the script really gets my mind a-brewing, thinking about all the wasteful, stress-inducing things we do to make life “easier”. More on this soon.

It appears that John McCain has put himself into situations suggesting that he had an sexual affair with a 40-year-old female lobbyist.  This politically devastating information can’t possibly be relevant to the current presidential campaign, unless…

Unless McCain has long-supported a political party that has consciously decided to make sexual moral pronouncements a major and unrelenting part of its political existence, all-the-while conflating the U.S. Constitution with the Ten Commandments and spewing this mentally-stunted version of democracy in a holier-than-thou piss-on you-if-you’re-different-than-who-we-claim-to-be sort of way.  McCain, of course, is also a prominent member of the Republican serial polygamy club, another manifestation of Republican hypocrisy when it comes to alleged Republican sexual purity.

Those conservatives who get angry at seeing political smear tactics involving sexual innuendo need to shut up and take this medicine because they’ve all earned it by voluntarily associating with a political party that specializes in hypocritical villainizing (sexual, racial, immigration status, religious beliefs, you name it).  If those who are upset by the release of this information regarding McCain and Iseman want these sorts of incidents to become irrelevant, they need to tell the Republican Party (by voting) to get government out of America’s bedrooms, for starters.

[The General George Meade statute located in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., created by Charles Grafley in 1927, apparently in a cultural climate much different than our own.  Posted here just for the hell of it - photo by Erich Vieth]

We’ll know that we’re cured of our obsession with the sexual practices of politicians when a politician’s private sexual choices are no more interesting to us than the private sexual choices of a sports celebrity or a famous movie director.   Can you imagine refusing to go to a movie because the director once had a marital affair?

Incidentally, private sexual conduct has nothing to do with whether a person would be a competent president.  Consider that each of the following presidents reportedly had affairs: Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy , Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland (who had a child with his mistress) and Thomas Jefferson.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because extremely powerful men are highly likely to have sexual affairs. It’s a fact of life, though this information often doesn’t come out until 30 years after the man’s death.  While that fact is not publicly known regarding a particular powerful living man, it is usually because he has a close-knitted circle of powerful comrades who keep that knowledge in check (for example, visit the above links and read about John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt).

The real dirt about McCain is not that he might have had sex with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but that he spends so much time with lobbyists.  McCain, the “anti-lobbyist,” is very comfortable with lobbyists.  For instance, consider with whom McCain huddles these days now that he’s essentially wrapped up the Republican nomination:

[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Sometimes you need a lunar eclipse to be reminded that we live on an amazing big sphere hurtling through space.   It’s not a wild fantasy story.    

And I guess my eyes are pretty good to see something that is a quarter million miles away. 

Lunar Eclipse - February 21, 2008 - St. Louis, Missouri

 The sun is beginning to emerge from Earth’s shadow here, semi-framed by a terrestrial holly tree. 

 [I took the first shot with a Canon S1Is (a 3.2 mega pixel camera with a 10x optical zoom), the second shot with a Canon A700 (a 6 mega pixel camera with a 6x optical zoom).  Both of these are consumer grade cameras.  I used a tripod for both, bracketing the exposures in a variety of ways--I deleted most of the photos I took.  It's amazing how just a tiny bit of vibration will ruin long exposure zoomed photos.  I ended up using the "timer" (time-delay) setting so my finger wouldn't shake the cameras].

I often enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan’s column, The Daily Dish.   In today’s post, Sullivan chastises Chris Matthews (and other journalists) for attacking Barack Obama’s alleged lack of legislative achievements.   In reality, Obama has been quite active in the legislative arena and Chris Matthews should have known better than make these spurious attacks.  Here are a few of the things Obama has accomplished:

* Ethics Reform: Obama was the Senate’s point person on ethics reform, and sponsored or co-sponsored the bills that made up what the Washington Post called “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.” I’m also a fan of this bill, which I think of as the Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens’ Muckraking Empowerment Act: it creates a searchable database of recipients of federal grants and contracts.

* The Lugar-Obama initiative to strengthen the Nunn-Luger framework for securing loose nukes, and to extend it to securing and destroying stockpiles of conventional arms. (For instance, shoulder-fired missiles that could be used against passenger airlines, fired at our forces, or used to make any number of ongoing conflicts more deadly.)

* Various bills concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina, including an amendment putting strict limits on the use of no-bid contracts after disasters, requiring planning for the evacuation of people with special needs and senior citizens, creating a National Emergency Family Locator System, etc.

See The Daily Dish for more.

The Atlantic has published this detailed article describes how the Internet works and doesn’t work in China.    The bottom line is that, in China, Internet censorship is sporadic yet effective.  

“If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China,” she told me. And being inside China means operating under the sweeping rules that govern all forms of media here: guidance from the authorities; the threat of financial ruin or time in jail; the unavoidable self-censorship as the cost of defiance sinks in.

Most blogs in China are hosted by big Internet companies. Those companies know that the government will hold them responsible if a blogger says something bad. Thus the companies, for their own survival, are dragooned into service as auxiliary censors.

Large teams of paid government censors delete offensive comments and warn errant bloggers. (No official figures are available, but the censor workforce is widely assumed to number in the tens of thousands.) Members of the public at large are encouraged to speak up when they see subversive material. The propaganda ministries send out frequent instructions about what can and cannot be discussed. In October, the group Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris, released an astonishing report by a Chinese Internet technician writing under the pseudonym “Mr. Tao.” He collected dozens of the messages he and other Internet operators had received from the central government.

This speaker’s name is Randy Pausch. This video shows a farewell speech that Pausch originally gave to his students at Carnegie Mellon.

This video is well worth your eleven minutes, especially if you have far more than eleven minutes to live. One of Pausch’s closing lines: “If you live properly, your dreams will come to you.”

You can find an alternate site for this video here (he gave his speech a second time on Oprah).

For more information, here’s Randy Pausch’s homepage.

I received this email from a regular reader in response to one of my responses to my Creationism in Florida Schools post:

“The real question that comes to my mind after reading this St. Petersburg Times poll is, should we allow popular demand to decide what is taught in science classes?”

How about for deciding what is taught in science, deciding tax policy, setting social programs, setting foreign policy, etc., etc., etc.? Should we allow popular demand to decide for these as well? I think we currently do, and I think it is with the same disastrous results. The next logical question is how should we pick the deciders? The problem is, we will never move to the next logical question.

What was considered ancient political wisdom at the time of the Caesars was: If the people can vote themselves bread and circuses, they will. Concentration of capital is the primary benefit of a taxation system. It allows big things to be done by a people of whom no individual member can afford. Government social programs (a form of insurance that used to be the province of churches, thus the tradition of tithing) are an example of dilution of capital. As is the Economic Stimulus Package that raced through our government checks and balances without much of either.

The examples of Ancient Greece, the Medici families (practically an empire unto themselves), the California legislature, and the Summerhill project (as described in the book by A.S. Neill) show that, once people get used to controlling their own disbursments as a group, they eventually regularly (but not always) behave in a responsible manner toward the group, and therefore unselfishly benefit themselves. Good things can, and usually do, come of it.

But a key word is “eventually”. They must vote themselves “pork” for long enough to see the damage done by not providing for the greater good. Our system would prevent sufficient damage to let people see how bad these decisions can be. So we are perpetually in the broad borderlands between doing something good, and fiscal collapse.

The Federal Government was set up as a coordinator between the States of the union, and to limit the power of States where it may interfere with rights of the people. Phrases like “Provide for the Common Defense” and “Insure domestic tranquility” come to mind. Early in the 20th century, legislators went hog wild amending the constitution.

Then we had a rash of arguably unconstitutional federal programs established, such as Income Tax and Social Security (technically, these are voluntary). But the federal income tax was set up to pay for the common defense (war debts). And with over 20 workers per retiree, who would mind 5% for retirement insurance, half paid by the employer? Rather than deal with charging the states that then pass the charges on to the residents as state taxes, it was more expedient to charge people directly, originally based on the ability to pay. The personal deduction was originally above the median family income. Now the deductible is well below the poverty level. Also there are now only 7 workers per retiree, and falling (14% to FICA).

(more…)

The March 2008 addition of Consumer Reports contains an article called “Nine Ways to a Longer Life.”  There’s lots of common sense advice, such as get enough sleep, exercise and don’t smoke.  There is also some less-obvious good advice, including the need to eat the right kind of fat.  For instance, the monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats found in nuts, seeds, vegetable oils and fish have been demonstrated to keep people healthier.

What is the number one way Consumer Report lists for living a longer life?  It’s eating whole grains.

(I photographed this bowl of my favorite whole grains: oat groats) 

What are the benefits of eating whole grains?

They reduce the risk of heart disease, several cancers, and inflammatory diseases such as asthma.  Studies have shown that breakfasts are can be a good way to get grains.

What’s a good way to learn about whole grains?  I’ve talked about them before.  My first foray into whole grains was Walter Willett’s excellent book, Eat Drink and Be Healthy.

I recently attended a lecture on how to make bread.  The chef spoke quite highly of a website sponsored by the Whole Grains Council.  What kinds of information are offered at the Whole Grains Council?

The Whole Grains Council helps consumers find whole grain foods and understand their health benefits; helps manufacturers create delicious whole grain products; and helps the media write accurate, compelling stories about whole grains.

What are whole grains?

Whole grains or foods made from them contain all the essential parts and naturally-occurring nutrients of the entire grain seed.

Some of the most common types of whole grains are:

• Wheat Berries
• Kamut 
• Spelt 
• Rye
• Triticale
• Oat Groats
• Barley 
• Brown Rice
• Wild Rice
• Job’s Tears
• Millet 
• Quinoa
• Amaranth
• Teff
• Kasha (Buckwheat Groats)
• Bulgur 

Here are some more of the incredible health benefits of eating whole grains on a regular basis (and see here).  All health-conscious people should flock to eat lots of whole grain food, of course.   I’ve saved the best two reasons to eat whole grains for last. 

Whole grains are easy to cook.  You don’t need a fancy steamer (really, you don’t).  Just spend about $30 for a Black & Decker Flavor-Scenter steamer; Diana Mirkin has published easy directions for cooking all of the types of whole grains.  Recipes for using whole grains are available all over the Internet, including at the Whole Grains Council (I often stir them into chili, soups and salads, and use them where ever I’d use rice).  It’s incredibly easy. 

The other reason for blending whole grains into your diet is that they taste delicious.  After you eat whole grains for awhile, you’ll never get excited about refined grains (e.g., white rice) again.   Another bonus is that eating whole grains makes it easier to lose weight, due to the increased fiber.

Here’s the catch.  It is sometimes not easy to identify the products that are truly made out of whole grains.  In fact, the Whole Grains Council dedicates a long webpage on how to decipher misleading packaging claims that a product contains whole grains.

Here in America, we get the support of superdelegates the tried and true way.   If you want a superdelegate’s support, pay them money.   This sordid practice was described by Massie Ritsch, Communications Director for the Center for Responsive Politics, in an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow:

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, what we did, Amy, was look back to 2005 and the 2006 election cycle and take a look the contributions that Clinton and Obama have made to the superdelegates, who are also elected officials themselves and have reelection campaigns, election campaigns that they have to raise money for. And what we’ve found is that, since then, Clinton and Obama have have contributed about $900,000 to these superdelegates. And then we’ve also found an interesting correlation, that you could predict with about 80 percent certainty which candidate these superdelegates would endorse, based on how much money they’ve gotten in campaign contributions from them.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Can you explain why are the candidates giving these delegates money?

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, I think what they were doing was giving other Democrats money. I don’t think they were thinking of them as superdelegates at the time, because we’re talking about the last election cycle, for the most part. But that’s what politicians do to get each other elected and reelected. I mean, it’s one way that you build relationships and introduce yourself to the rest of the team. You’re expected to support each other. And when you have money in your campaign coffers and someone else is in need of money in theirs, there’s often a transfer, a contribution made to help them out. And then the expectation is that the favor will be repaid somehow down the road.

AMY GOODMAN: And just be clear who the superdelegates are, they’re all current members of Congress?

MASSIE RITSCH: Well, they’re not all current members of Congress, but the ones that we were looking at were the elected officials: current members of Congress who are Democrats, state governors. And then, the rest of the superdelegates are party officials.

I watched a few minutes of a Sunday morning Fox political program, and noticed that their fair and balanced coverage of presidential politics had several distinct spins.

On the republican side, McCain is the anointed candidate.

On the Democrat side, the race will be decided by the super-delegates. Every bit of subtle mud that can be slung at Obama is being dug and slung. Why just Obama?

The message is clear: Conservatives think that Obama is electable, and they are not particularly worried about Clinton. It’s a safe bet that they have a campaign set up to effectively counter a Clinton candidacy; they’ve had over a decade to do the research. But they might fear that a proverbial left-field candidate like Obama might do something rash if elected, like expose and change the underpinnings of the lengthy and profitable electoral process.

Maybe they think that Muslim radicals will have a harder time convincing their young followers that Barack Hussein Obama is the enemy, and the profitable war will wind down.

Perhaps they simply think that he is activating the youth vote, and once the draft-age population is politically involved, all the profitable “wars” (on drugs, on terror, etc) will fade.

Possibly they fear that his multicultural upbringing and education will make it impossible for him to see just the narrow picture when asked to approve dumb laws and expensive and futile unfunded mandates.

Maybe it’s just that their pollsters think that someone with less of a melanin deficiency is more electable than one with two complete x chromosomes.

But, hey. I’m just an ignorant blogger.

It’s difficult to overcome the prejudice that having more choices is always better.   In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz made a convincing case that too much choice can overload and paralyze us.   I couldn’t help but think of the paradox of choice while grocery shopping yesterday.  

One of the major chains of grocery stores in the midwest is Schnucks (that’s right, 7 consonants and only one vowel).   Schnucks has done business in St. Louis since well before I was born.  I’m assuming that Schnucks is a typical grocery store and, therefore, that it stocks as many as 30,000 different products in each of its stores–a formidable number.

As I shopped yesterday, I took a few photos to illustrate the point made by Barry Schwartz.   Here, for instance, is the mustard aisle, offering you about 30 kinds of mustard:

And that’s just the beginning.  Here’s the pickle department.  I will occasionally eat a pickle, but if you told me that I could never again have a pickle, it wouldn’t upset me in the least.  Many people value pickles more highly than I do, apparently.  Here they are, dozens of types of pickles, ready for you to choose.

I was on a roll (and I was having some fun), so I moved over to the pasta aisle:

There were a lot more types of pasta than one could fit in a single photo.  

Was there any major product, I wondered, where you could simply choose between two or three types?  The answer is “no” regarding most of the things most of us purchase most of the time.  There were hundreds of types of liquor, tea, cheese, snacks, cookies, cake mixes, cereals and pizzas, all of this choice making it so incredibly difficult to whisk in and out of the store.   You can imagine a comment echoing across America every day:  “No, not that type!  I wanted you to buy the mini, mint flavored, instant, Brazilian, fiber-enhanced, artificially sweetened low-fat version with individual servings!”

Ready for another photo?  How many types of peanut butter can there possibly be?  After all, it’s only smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener, right?

Actually, there are many types of smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener (some types coming with no sweetener).  

I decided to end my little tour at the non-dairy creamer section, assuming that there would be only few types of this product (I’m not a coffeee or tea drinker, and I’ve never actually paid attention).

There they were.  Enough brands to start a fight in any well-behaved household in the country. 

I can’t find the statistics to support me at the moment, but it seems to me that grocery stores doing business when I was young (in the 1960’s) probably carried only 20% as many products as modern grocers.  It’s also funny to consider what “works” for modern buying clubs.  Costco seems to do very well with only a couple types of each food product.   If you want pretzels, you pick either this one or that one.   If you want a jar of Vitamin D tablets, here’s your only choice (unlike the mega vitamin selection you’ll find in a Walgreen’s–if you really want to have your head spun around by choices of vitamins or supplements, shop on the Internet.  For instance, the Vitamin Shoppe brags that it carries 20,000 distinct products. 

Choosing a tombstone can also be exhausting, according to Rock of Ages.  You’ve simply got to pick the right one, or else the dead person might get hurt feelings: 

Selecting the granite for a memorial can be confusing-much like selecting a fine gemstone. If you’ve ever purchased a diamond, you know that even stones that appear similar can vary greatly in quality and value. It takes special tools and expertise to tell a perfect stone from an imperfect one-whether diamond or granite.

And what about choosing a pet dog?  For our family, it was relatively easy.  We went to the local Humane Society and took home one of the bouncy mutts (I admit that we focused on type of dogs known to be friendlier with children).   If you want to do it right, though, you might want to spend a few hours looking over all of this material at Wonder Puppy.  Before having a wine and cheese party, you simply must spend a few days learning to become a competent beginner wine-buyer here. 

It just doesn’t stop, here in the U.S.    Good enough is simply not good enough.  It’s often said that we are so choosy because we need to make the “right” choice, but that rationale doesn’t convince me.   I think that there we are often shopping for sex, whether we realize it or not.  The cure for this madness?  I don’t know that there is one, though the “Church of Stop Shopping” is trying to lend a hand to neurotic shoppers everywhere.

If choice makes us neuotic (Schwartz has convinced me that it has), we are “lucky” that we don’t have excess choices in all aspects of life.  For instance, we are in the process of wiping out many types of fish, by some estimates, 90% of the large predatory fish of the oceans, such as swordfish, marklin and the biggest types of tuna.   Soon, we’ll be surprised that there is any fish at all in the restaurant.  We’ll happily take whatever they have.

And our voting neuroses will be kept to a minimum this election (as almost every election), because we only have two choices for president (at least for those of us who vote for someone who might actually serve as President).    

According to this video by JustforeignPolicy.org, Iran once was a democracy. Until a foreign power crushed that democracy in 1953.

The take-away message from this video: it doesn’t have to be the way it is currently portrayed to be between Iran and the U.S.

The history of relations between the United States and Iran has been marked by misunderstanding and mistrust shaped by the unjust use of violence and threats of violence. Violent conflict has not served the interests of either country. Military threats have only deepened the hostilities and resentment and this makes future conflict more likely. Serious diplomacy between our two countries is urgently needed.

In this interview on Bill Moyers’ Feb 15, 2008 show (see the video here), author Susan Jacoby argues that we are now struggling with ignorance as a political crisis.   She argues that we are obsessessed with small personal facts at the expense of important issues.  Most Americans don’t spend the necessary time to have a legitimate base of knowledge from which to make important decisions. 

Yet politicians dare not address this crisis of ignorance.  They won’t talk about the political significance of public ignorance, even though it is the widespread public ignorance of basic facts that “makes serious deception possible and plausible.”

Jacoby offers quite a few anecdotes.  One of these anecdotes is about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s radio addresses during World War II.  Roosevelt urged his listeners to go get a map and to look at the map while he talked about the significant events of that war.  It’s hard to imagine any political figure doing that today.  Jacoby cites statistics indicating that only a small number of today’s high school graduates have any idea of where the various countries of the Middle East are located on a world map on which the country boundaries are drawn.

She takes it as a truism that our political culture is a reflection of our general culture. We don’t want to learn anymore.  We go to websites and we attend lectures only when we want to hear information that reinforces what we are ready now.  Only a small minority of people are any longer willing to learn from people with whom they disagree.  Jacoby blames this on the reduced attention span of Americans.It also has to do with the number of Americans who exercise critical thinking.  One-half of Americans believe in ghosts.  One-third of Americans believe in astrology.  One-half of Americans do not believe in evolution.

Jacoby party blames the media.  The news media presents “truth as equidistant from two points.” For example, evolution and creationism are presented as two equally valid viewpoints by the news media.  Jacoby calls this tactic “dumb objectivity.”She cites a shocking statistic (put forth by Stephen Prothero in a book called Religious Literacy): one-half of Americans cannot name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. This lack of information is shocking because huge numbers of Americans claim that the Bible is the most important book in the world.  Here’s more shocking statistics: 15% of Americans do not understand that the Earth revolves around the sun.  Most Americans don’t know how many Justices are on the United States Supreme Court.

The ignorance goes on and on, and it is imperiling our democracy.   It makes you wonder what we are spending our time doing.   Here’s a hint:  you can find multiple magazine racks like this at most supermarkets.

(Photo by Erich Vieth. Click to enlarge image).

Ralph Nader recently sent a pointed letter to President Bush.   The letter concerned a annual national tragedy of 58,000 of needless workplace deaths.  Here is an excerpt (from Common Dreams):

Dear President Bush:

I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, D.C. last week, while reviewing materials on occupational hazards in the workplace. The contrast between your declarations and the ongoing annual tragedy of 58,000 Americans losing their lives due to workplace diseases and traumas (OSHA figures) was astonishing and deplorable.

Your remarks included such phrases as “You and I believe in accountability;” “People should be responsible for their actions;” “Maintaining a culture of life;” and that “My number one priority is to protect you;” “All human life is precious and deserves to be protected.”

These are words and phrases that you have been using year after year in your capacity as a judicially-selected President who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.

Therefore, let us apply your verbal sensitivities about accountability, responsibility and the safety of working Americans, to your sworn duty to uphold the job safety laws of your Administration.

Is the United States doing everything it can to protect its citizens from deaths and injuries from exposure to chemicals?  Not at all.  In fact, the U.S. is working hard to keep its citizens in the dark, according to this disturbing article from Harpers.  The Harpers article concerns the E.U. chemical regulation called REACH—Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals:

Europe is now compelling other nations’ manufacturers to conform to regulations that are far more protective of people’s health than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the world’s leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders. Those roles were once filled by the United States.

The U.S. media needs to focus harder.  A death is a death, but we get distracted in this time of our “war” on “terrorism.”   For our news media, a death at the hands of a “terrorist” is 1,000 times more newsworthy than most other deaths (including most other preventable deaths).  There is no good reason for this disparity.

For more on deaths and statistics, “mere statistics.”visit this article regarding some of the many ways 3,000 people could die.  And see this post for many examples of mere statistics that should deeply move us.  Real life spiders make us jump and the cancellation of a TV show makes us visibly angry, while most real life deaths bore us. 

(Click on the photo to enlarge image.) 

I enjoyed this image of geese in Forest Park (St. Louis, Missouri), so stopped the car and I took this photo.   We don’t seem to have much snow in St. Louis anymore, so picturesque winter scenes are especially fun when they do occur. 

Is anyone else struck by the irony that Homeland Security so often erodes First Amendment rights? Homeland Security has become obsessed about listening to personal phone calls and seizing people’s cell phones and laptops when they travel.  Ironically, there is no security for the victims of gunmen who shoot up college campuses and city council meetings.

At 48 years old, I can remember attending high school and college without any fear that someone would walk in and begin blasting away. The recent stories on the news, starting with last year’s Virginia Tech shooting, followed by a local killing rampage at a Kirkwood City Council meeting (5 dead, 2 critically injured, one of whom was the city’s mayor), and yesterday’s deaths on the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, has me wondering what has changed? Is it my level of awareness or is it a change in the basic behavior and beliefs of Americans?

Initially outraged by the extremely cavalier treatment of US citizens with Muslim backgrounds who attempt to travel out of the United States, I now find myself feeling deeply saddened and frustrated that innocent folks are uselessly harassed while others, intent on venting their rage, are so easily able to take many lives in a few short minutes. Is there a connection here? I think there is.
 
For eight years now we’ve lived in an atmosphere of fear, created by and fed by an embedded media that supports a President and a government that speaks of terrorism and “The Enemy” as something out there, waiting to get us all.

Whatever we might think about the media’s ability to affect how we think and behave, I personally believe it is impossible to escape its effect altogether. Even if we refuse to turn on the TV or the radio, there is the Internet.  And even if we do not indulge in surfing the Internet, our neighbors, friends and family members are certainly not on a low- or no-media diet. The atmosphere of fear pervades the very air we breathe.
 
Unfortunately, there is no respite and there are no sure-fire solutions offered by the government or the media. Homeland Security?  It’s not effective.  It’s a “war” we cannot win. Just as computer viruses and system break-ins continue to be engineered by those with the fever to destroy, terrorists bent on passing through security lines will think of new and creative ways to detonate their bombs and kill people.

The result is that we feel completely out of control. Guess what? It’s true. We are. Despite increased security (That woman’s a Muslim! Take her cell phone!), shooting rampages continue, children continue to be raped and kidnapped, and the fear builds.

We can run but we can’t hide from fear. We can keep our children indoors and we can give them cell phones with instructions to call us from wherever they go, but we still can’t quell the fear. Fear has the capacity to build on itself and, without a means to face it, we become driven by it.  The Fearful people themselves become dangerous. People who are basically motivated by fear can become so angry and frustrated that they act out. They sometimes kill. (more…)

How does one find a transitional fossil?  It’s a lot harder than I ever imagined.

I just started reading a book that looks quite promising: Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (2008), by Neil Shubin.  The author is a professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago.  Shubin is also the provost of the Field Museum in Chicago.

The first thirty pages of the book have been delightful.  Shubin is a paleontologist who ended up teaching human anatomy.  He discovered that this was a good combination, because “the best roadmaps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals.”  By looking at other animals, we can often better understand the complex structure of the human body.  “The reason is that the bodies of these creatures are often simpler versions of ours.”

Shubin was part of the expedition that discovered Tiktaalik, a 375 million-year-old fish fossil that represents an intermediate life form.  In fact, Tiktaalik represents one of the greatest transitions in the history of life: the invasion of land by fish.

Like a fish, it has scales on its back and fans with thin webbing.  But, like early land-living animals, it has a flat head and neck.  And, when we look inside the fan, we see bones that correspond to the upper arm, the forearm, even parts of the wrist.  The joints are there to: this is a fish with shoulder, elbow and wrist joints.  All inside a fin with webbing.

[This photo is from Wikipedia].  Shubin details the extensive planning that was necessary to find this world-class fossil.  You don’t just randomly pick a spot to start digging for rare transitional life forms.  “We look for places that have rocks of the right age, rocks of the right type to preserve fossils, and rocks that are exposed at the surface.  There is another factor: serendipity.”

It takes a lot of work to know where to dig and how to dig out a fossil of the sort.  It took Shubin six summertime trips to a remote area in the Arctic.  And you don’t just drive out there in a car. There are no roads anywhere to be seen.  It takes a lot of money and therefore a lot of persuading in order to get the necessary grants to allow a highly trained team to go out to such remote spots.

Speaking of remote, Shubin mentions that ancient sea floors show up in the darndest places.  For instance, if you go to the North face of Mount Everest, almost within sight of the mountain peak, you can find fossilized sea shells (you can also find lots of ancient sea creature fossils at the top of the Grand Canyon).  The place where Shubin found Tiktaalik would seem equally unlikely to those of us who are not familiar with paleontology.  The area where Tiktaalik was discovered (Ellesmere Island, Canada, only 1000 miles from the North Pole) was formerly an ancient tropical delta, much like the current Amazon, where fish would have thrived and fossilized.  This area was chosen because geologists had previously discovered that exposed rock dated roughly 375 million to 380 million years old existed at Ellesmere.  After discovering Tiktaalik Shubin named it.  Tiktaalik is an Inuit word meaning “large freshwater fish.”

Shubin writes with a personal yet precise style.  The journey he is discussing in his book doesn’t only have to do with finding the ancient fish he discovered near the North Pole. That is just the beginning.  Most of the book has to do with the relationship between ancient fish and modern human anatomy:

How can I be so sure that this fossil says something about my own body?  Consider the neck of Tiktaalik .  All fish prior to Tiktaalik have a set of bones attached to the skull to the shoulder, so that every time the animal band its body, it also bent his head.  Tiktaalik is different.  The head is completely free of the shoulder.  This whole arrangement is shared with amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including us.  The entire shift can be traced to the loss of a few small bones in a fish like Tiktaalik.  I can do a similar analysis for the wrists, ribs, errors, and other parts of our skeleton-all these features can be traced back to a fish like this.  This fossil is just as much a part of our history as the African hominids, such as australopithecus afarensis, the famous “Lucy.”  Seeing Lucy, we can understand our history is highly advanced primates.  Seeing Tiktaalik is seeing our history as fish.

As a make my way through Shubin’s book further, I’ll will be writing more about it at this site.  I’m really looking forward to this. 

I’m tempted to send copies of this book to a few creationist acquaintances, so that they can read Shubin’s fascinating account about the existence and discovery of an undeniable transitional life form.   Then again, those creationists would probably deny that the fish with a neck and a wrist ever lived, arguing that God put that fossil there to test their faith . . .

Superdelegates
Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons

Rebate checks
Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria

Obama Love
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

[Note from Erich:  DI has a purchased a license from Cagle Cartoons to publish these cartoons.  We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists. ]

Just a heads-up.   We are switching over to a faster and higher-capacity server, but that will necessitate an interruption in service.   It might only be a few hours, but I’ve been told that it could take as long as 24 hours for this site to once again become available everywhere in the world.  

The switch-over will take place in the next day or two.  

If you try to visit this site and you can’t find us, then, don’t necessarily assume that we’ve been shut down by the Department of Homeland Security.  

John Paulos, well-known for his writings on mathematics (he is a professor of mathematics at Temple University), has now published a book on the topic of God. In Irreligion he asks whether there are any logical or mathematically substantiated reasons to believe in God. He concludes that the answer is a resounding no.

Irreligion is a short book (only 150 pages) and it is written cleanly, with lots of humor stirred in.

Paulos gets off to a good start when he insists that you can’t really argue whether God exists unless you define what you mean by “God.” He recognizes, for example, that some people use the term God to refer to the laws of physics or nature itself. This book, however, is addressed to those who believe in a more traditional version of God:

Most conventional monotheistic characterizations of God (Yahweh, Allah) take Him to be an entity or Being that is, if not omnipotent, at least extraordinarily powerful; if not omniscient, at least surpassingly wise; if not the Creator of the universe, at least intimately connected with its origin; if not completely and absolutely perfect, at least possessor of all manner of positive characteristics. This formulation will, on the whole, be my definition of God and the many flawed arguments for this entity’s existence will be my primary focus.

By this definition, an atheist is “someone who believes that such an entity does not exist.” An agnostic is “someone who believes that whether God exists or not is unknown, unknowable, or a meaningless question. Paulos goes on to point out, however, that “it’s certainly possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic.” I found this to be an interesting intellectual move, since many nonbelievers spend considerable energy trying to figure out whether they are atheistic or agnostic. Here’s Paulos view:

Think, for example, of the innumerable historical figures or events and whose existence or occurrence we don’t believe, but about whose existence and occurrence we’re not absolutely sure. The definitions of these terms are, of course, sensitive to the definition of God to which one subscribes. Define God in a sufficiently nebulous way as beauty, love, mysterious complexity, or the ethereal taste of strawberry shortcake, and most atheists become theists. Still, although one can pose as Humpty Dumpty and aver, “When I use the word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” others needn’t play along.

(p. xiv). On this question of definitions, Paulos offers a possible “proto-religion” for atheists and agnostics:

By this I mean a “religion” that has no dogma, no narratives, and no existence claims and yet still acknowledges the essential awe and wonder of the world and perhaps affords as well an iota of serenity. The best I’ve been able to come up with is the “Yeah-ist” religion, whose response to the intricacy, beauty, and mystery of the world is a simple affirmation and acceptance, “Yeah,” and whose only prayer is the one word “Yeah.”

(more…)

There are 2 places in the Bible that can be interpreted (by squinting at just the right translation) as saying that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. This point of geology is made by counting Genesis periods (”days” in most English translations) and lifetimes in the (assumed complete) genealogies (in which “months” and “years” are regularly cross-translated).

A point that the Bible makes more often and more clearly is that the world is flat. Yep, if you believe in the inerrancy of Bible, then the world is flat. The moon landing hoax conspiracy theory actually got its start from the Flat Earth Society (http://theflatearthsociety.org, or Here is a flat earth site that Google likes better).

Anyway, this is about the pure truth of the Bible with links to the 12 cited passages:

• Dn.4:11: The tree grew, and it became strong enough and tall enough to reach the sky. It could be seen everywhere on earth.
  (Describe a shape from all points of which a vertical line can be seen)
• Dn.2:35 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
  (Describe a solid shape that another object can completely cover by expanding its size without deforming) (more…)

And he does it well. This is no silly stunt.

Don’t ever call me close minded, even though I often am.

I was on a business trip in Atlanta yesterday and we had two hours to waste before heading for the Atlanta airport.  My coworker and I decided to explore downtown Atlanta on foot.  Several local people suggested that we visited “The Underground,” an entertainment and tourist area.  It was at “The Underground” that I met Sherry, a tarot card reader.   About 50 years of age, Sherry sat peacefully by a small table, but it was her red green and yellow hair that I first noticed.  Her simple sign indicated that she was willing to give short tarot card readings for $10.

I took the empty chair in front of Sherry and she wasted no time telling me about myself.  She consulted both her horoscope books and tarot cards before confidently announcing “You are excellent at arguing, you like to make arguments and you would make a good lawyer.”  She never varied on this point.  In fact, she went further.  She told me that my North Mode was in Sagittarius, which suggests that I would be “good at law and government.”

Her announcement regarding my career was somewhat disarming since I am a lawyer and I’ve been a lawyer for more than 25 years. It was also surprising to hear Sherry make this announcement about my career so confidently because I was not wearing a suit or tie and because most people who are just getting to know me are rather surprised to hear that I am a lawyer (I’m not sure what that means).

If Sherry had stopped with her announcement that I was a lawyer, I would’ve really been impressed.  But then she started throwing out lots of broad and vague suggestions.  For instance, she claimed that I was moody (”you’ve been through some stuff”).  She told me that I was “stubborn” (I refused, simply refused, to go along with this characterization).  She told me that I was “having a hard time in my marriage” (this will seem possible for everyone except for those people who have absolutely perfect marriages).  She told me that “security is very important to you.”  She told me that I was sometimes sad, possibly depressed (well, it is true that I’m not always perfectly happy).

She told me that my wife and I were going to have another child (which was interesting, given that I had a vasectomy).  She saw the look on my face, then asked if that was possible. “Not really,” I said.  She looked straight at me as asked, “Have you been fixed?”  Surprised at her directness, I nodded.

Sherry then told me that last December I witnessed a change in my life, “a change for the better” (perhaps she was talking about Santa Claus visiting the house).  Sherry told me that I was “creative” (would anyone ever be offended at this, I wondered?).  After pulling out some more tarot cards with baby images, Sherry asked if I had children, and I told her yes.  She then proudly announced that I have a daughter who is “pregnant.” Perhaps this should have concerned me, but it didn’t, since my daughters are seven and nine years of age.

Sherry apparently makes a decent living doing her routine.  She told us that she can make $500 each weekend day at the big mall, reading tarot cards.

My reading was really a disappointment, given the terrific start to this tarot card reading.  I ended up getting nothing life-changing.  It was especially a disappointment because Sherry forgot to tell me that my flight back to St. Louis was about to be canceled due to an ice storm.

New unbelievable rule from the Bush Administration, as reported by MSNBC:

A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a multibillion-dollar loophole: The proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not apply to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why these two exceptions? Is it because the system would be overwhelmed by the fraud they would find? Or will one best find the answer by following the money?

“I hate to sound cynical, but what lobbyist working for a contractor in Iraq wanted this get-out-of-jail card?” asked Patrick Burns, spokesman for the government watchdog group.

I learned of this detestable new Bush policy on the same day I received my copy of Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” a DVD by Robert Greenwald. I’ll comment on this video soon.

This bit of depressing news was reported by The Crypt: 

An attempt to strip lawsuit immunity for telecom firms which helped the government tap phone calls fell well short in the Senate, leaving liberal Democrats on the losing side of what they believe is a fundamental civil liberties debate.

Only 31 senators _ all Democrats _ voted to take away retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies facing lawsuits over wiretaps carried out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Sixty-seven senators _ a mix of Republicans and Democrats _ voted against the amendment.

The vote also provided an opportunity to showcase the key differences on national security between presidential candidates, as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), voted against immunity for telecoms, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), voted to keep immunity in the bill. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) did not show up for the vote. All three candidates were in the Washington area for the region’s three primaries today.

For more background, see this post by Glenn Greenwald.