Bear with us as we improve this site. I realize that the comments function was not working this morning. That has now been fixed. Also, posting capacity was down for awhile. Those problems have been ironed out.

We’re making lots of changes here, most of them to the backside of the site. These changes (I am told by Nick Smith, our website designer) will make our site faster and easier to use. Last night, Nick upgraded this site to the newest version of WordPress, adding dozens of new plug-ins. We now have the capacity for podcasting and we will soon have the capacity to host our own videos.  We are considering numerous other changes that will improve navigation.

There are a few features that will appear (and, perhaps, disappear) on the home page in the next couple of days. We are trying out a few things and mulling them over.

If anyone has any comments on the usability or technical issues with this site, I would really appreciate your feedback, so we can address the situation.

Sifting through some of my photos from last year, I found a shot that tickled and confused me at the time that I took it, and still does now. I would like to share it with all of you.

But first some background: Last summer, I was watching my city’s Gay Pride Parade in my city’s token “gay area”. Amid the drag queens, Log Cabin Republicans, gay flag teams and buses full of lesbians, stood this curious man:

I still wonder about you, Gay Pride Confederate. Do you bear the flag as a sign of irony? If you do support what this flag represents, why do you live in the “gay” side of town? Do you brandish the flag as a symbol of your southern roots, as you drink wine topless at 10 in the morning? Do you represent life in a modern age full of contradictions? Mr. Gay-Pride-Confederate-Who-Also-Appears-To-Be-Black, you fascinate me.

This article by Alex Williams covers a lot of territory, including:

The environmental costs of suburban life, which evolved around the highway system, cheap oil, and the automobile and now typically consumes several times more energy per person (and thus fossil fuels) than urban living. There’s all that driving. There are the chugging mowers and fertilizers and pesticides used to keep all those lawns lovely. Lighting, heating and cooling those ballooning homes consumes vast amounts of energy compared to a city apartment — or a house half a century ago. ncluding the environmental costs of suburbia.

See, also, the trailer of “The End of Suburbia,” here.   And here’s a good read:  My other car is a bright green city. 

Here are the major differences, set forth by Harvey Wasserman of Free Press:

As we stumble toward another presidential election, it’s never been more clear that our political process is being warped by a corporate stranglehold on the free flow of information. Amidst a virtual blackout of coverage of a horrific war, a global ecological crisis and an advancing economic collapse, what passes for the mass media is itself in collapse. What’s left of our democracy teeters on the brink. The culprit, in the parlance of the day, has been the “Mainstream Media,” or MSM.

But that’s wrong name for it. Today’s mass media is Corporate, not Mainstream, and the distinction is critical. Calling the Corporate Media (CM) “mainstream” implies that it speaks for mid-road opinion, and it absolutely does not.

Charles Darwin was born on Feb 12, 1809. This was about two generations after Leclerc published a book stating that species are interrelated, and are seen to change over time. Darwin was a bible scholar, and got a degree in Divinity (not science). But his studies of geology and then biology, and his decision to publish popular books about his observations rather than staid peer-reviewed articles led him to his present fame (or infamy, depending on your church).

Here is a good Darwin Day article showing the evolution of his ideas, based on biographer and science writer P. Thomas Carroll, who published and annotated Darwin’s correspondence.

Not to slight our own, here is Erich’s post from “Evolution Weekend” 2007.

It’s easy to call Cookie Thorton a madman. No one in his or her right mind would walk into a civilized city council meeting and open fire - we can all agree on that. But by writing this week’s shooting in Kirkwood off as the aberrant act of a crazed mind, we are left coming up empty when we ask why. Platitudes will abound, only God can know why these innocent people were taken from us, they will say. My sympathies lie with the families and friends of all the victims, including Mr. Thorton. He snapped, that much is obvious. My challenge to investigative journalists is to examine this story deeply - from all sides - until the underlying truths can be pried free and examined openly. Hopefully, we can all learn from the complex tensions that plague the Kirkwoods of our world.

Kirkwood is a robust community, straddling the older inner suburban ring and the vast newer suburban sprawl fanning out from St. Louis. It is one of the last bastions of great older housing stock, vast Victorians and cozy brick cottages all on substantial lots and connected by sidewalks and parks and schools. New construction has been squeezed in, too, with condos popping up as well as the random new home over a razed lot. Its town center thrives with shops and salons, restaurants and coffee houses. A popular community college, a hospital and a busy recreation center, complete with a theater, ice rink and a swimming park full of fountains and activities, add to Kirkwood’s stability and appeal. The southern edge has become a retail mecca, with not only a Sam’s Club and a Wal-Mart, but also a Target right next door. Strip malls connect them and face another row across the road.

I don’t live in Kirkwood, but I go there to shop and eat. I have a good friend who moved there from the city; oh, and my shrink’s office is housed in one of the many medical buildings scattered around the hospital, so I do visit now and again, let’s say. My friend loves living in Kirkwood, and I know many others who feel the same. A co-worker grew up there, and happened to be back there the night of the shooting, enjoying Ben and Jerry’s with her family right across the street from City Hall. She was visibly shaken as she recounted the story to us the next day - not so much by the hour or so they’d been locked down inside with their treats, but more by the identity of the shooter. She knew Cookie, she said. When my friend was in school, he’d married her P.E. teacher, and would stop by now and then to visit. He’d play games with them, getting them active and laughing. He was just wonderful, she said. We all loved him. I’ve heard that more than once these last few days. He was delightful, so kind. A great guy. Wow. What happened? Did he succumb to some lurking mental illness, some defect that can’t possibly affect any of us “normal” citizens? Or was it something else?

Cookie Thorton lived in Meacham Park, the one part of Kirkwood that most citizens don’t want to mention. Meacham Park is run down. It doesn’t fit the Kirkwood image. The houses are tiny, the yards not typically landscaped and sometimes hardly mowed. Many are rentals, and by and large, the residents of Meacham Park are poor. And as is too often the case, they are also mostly black.

I visited one of these residents regularly a few years back. She was the foster mom of a baby I represented as a CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocate), or Voices for Children as they are now called in St. Louis. This woman was lovely, big and loud and full of life. She loved that baby with all her heart, and I clearly remember wishing that all foster kids could have the privilege of being cuddled by someone like her as they waited for their lives to be sorted out by the grown-ups supposedly in charge.

Her house was small, but it was clean and tidy. She managed to get by on a minimal income; she’d moved there so that her own kids could go to the Kirkwood schools for a good education. They got by with a lot fewer things but as much love and laughter as you’d find in any of the sprawling Victorians rising only a few blocks away. Sadly, they also got by on a lot less respect than is given to those for whom success is measured by the weight of their possessions.

Meacham Park made headlines in 2005 when Kevin Johnson shot and killed a police officer in his patrol car. Johnson was just recently sentenced to the death penalty. He did kill a cop but I’m not sure how the fact that his younger brother had just died that same day didn’t somehow ameliorate the sentence. Especially since his brother had collapsed at home, and according to some witnesses, the police were slow to respond. Johnson believed they didn’t do enough to help. Maybe they thought he’d collapsed because of an overdose, or because he’d been fighting. Maybe they responded just fine and were only perceived to have not cared. Regardless, Johnson felt like they didn’t give what was a legitimate medical emergency (the brother died of a heart ailment) its due. He was distraught and in his grief needed to blame someone. He made a horrible, cold decision to “take out the first cop he saw.” He didn’t think, he acted irrationally. One of the officers provided a target for that grief, and now Johnson is scheduled to join his brother in death. All of it, senseless. Johnson had been in trouble with the law before, and I am not, in any way, defending his actions any more than those of Cookie Thorton. He caused great grief to an entire community, and he should pay dearly for his actions, absolutely. But until we look hard at the underlying problems here - the tension between minority residents in a low-income neighborhood and the powers-that-be in their town - I fear more of these episodes on the horizon.

Meacham Park residents are certainly not all steeped in a mentality of violence, nor is the violence in our fair municipality concentrated there. But I’d be a fool if I said that it doesn’t exist, and we’d all be fools to deny that the ready access to firearms in this country makes acting upon emotional outbursts potentially more violent and permanent. I believe, as a culture, we’ve taken our right to bear arms (which I support in its basic form) to an absurd extreme, but that remains another debate for another time.

Cookie Thorton apparently had owned an asphalt business. According to his brother, he’d been promised a slice of the redevelopment work in the area a few years back, presumably when the strip malls and box stores went in. A goodly amount of work for an asphalt guy, what with the flat roofing and the expansive parking lots to cover. He didn’t get it, though, and without the work he believed the city fathers had promised him, how could he afford to find himself a space for his business? So he parked his trucks at his home, providing an open target for an annoyed city government. My guess is that he’d complained about not getting the work, maybe even loudly. We do know that he was a vocal complainer, doing so loudly and bitterly and eventually bizarrely once the spat began in earnest. He felt slighted, he complained, and my guess is that the city decided to quiet him by citing him for parking commercial vehicles in a residential area. Uh-oh, you can’t do that! City ordinances prohibit it, and he was breaking the law. Cut and dried, that’s what that is.

Those city ordinances are designed to protect the appearances of neighborhoods, we all know that. Who wants a big ol’ asphalt truck hunkered down in their block? I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. But what was Cookie to do? Sell his trucks and lose his business? And if he’s paying fine after fine to the city that promised him work and didn’t deliver, how is he supposed to save up for a business lot onto which he could move the trucks? No one, it seems, could find a compromise.

Again, easy to say who’s right and who’s wrong here. Cookie broke the law, the city tried to enforce it, he fought them and lost, he should just shut up and deal with it. Right? He certainly shouldn’t have taken the action he did on Wednesday night. But what?

Have you ever tried to deal with a local bureaucracy? Merely by mentioning this to people, I’ll wager you’d hear story after frustrated story. I know I did. One woman told me about her husband’s business being tortured by a city council upset with his business partner. Her husband had poured piles of money into rehabbing old property and revitalizing another inner suburb here by opening a popular and thriving restaurant, but his partner managed to aggravate the council. My friend and her husband felt completely battered, cited and fined and slowed down by one minute detail after another. Code violations were being selectively enforced, as other developers got away with sidestepping them one after the other. And once the offending business partner was bought out and sent packing, the council suddenly had no more time to mess with them and, poof, it all went away.

Another friend told me about the hoops he was required to jump through when trying to sell a small house in a faltering suburb, an area in which property values were falling and people were consistently moving away. His house failed inspection for the most inane reasons, while the homes of elderly neighbors who were being moved to nursing homes were consistently passed in the exact same condition as his. The last straw for him was grass - the house would have passed save for a bit of grass in the driveway. He went to city hall and engaged in a shouting match with an inspector, his frustration blazing. He said he totally understood the feeling of frustration Cookie Thorton must have felt. He felt it that day. The security guard came in ready to haul him away, but realized he was only venting, and let him have his say. My friend is a fairly small man, Caucasian and clean-cut. I wonder, had he been shaped or colored otherwise, would it have played out the same way? I’m not sayin’. Just wondering . . .

Another friend impeccably rehabbed a house in the city, across the street from mine. He had French doors installed on the front of the second story, leading out to a small deck over the front porch. Our volunteer “block captain” turned him in to the city for code violations, for not maintaining the historical integrity of the structure. The house had been boarded up for years, mind you, a real eyesore on an otherwise pleasant block. And nearly every other rehabbed house up and down the street had been changed in some way that violated the historic building code - wrong windows, glass blocks, you name it. But she turned him in because the old door hadn’t been French. And when she was questioned about it, she stated that it wouldn’t be fair to turn the other people in, because they couldn’t afford to pay the fines or make the changes. But this guy, well, he’s in the media so he can afford it. She said this with a straight face, as if anyone in her right mind could see her logic and would agree that equal enforcement of the rules made very little sense.

So much for cut and dried. So much for winning if you play by the rules, losing if you don’t. You win if you don’t piss them off, that’s all. If you do, well, God help you.

Personally, I think Cookie Thorton was driven to his insane end not by mental illness but by cultural illness. Not by overt racism but by the insidious intolerance of those who struggle by those who do not, resting precariously on a base of generational racism on both sides. Mayor Swoboda of Kirkwood, who as of this writing is fighting for his life in a local hospital, certainly did not deserve to get shot - nor did anyone else that night. Disputes should be able to be solved in other ways, civilly, not by “going to war,” as Cookie’s brother said he did. The mayor has a reputation in some circles, though, spoken quietly several times over the past couple of days, for being intolerant of those who didn’t agree or go along with him.

Cookie most assuredly didn’t go along. He wanted to be treated fairly and he believed that he was not. He pushed against the system and the system pushed back, hard. He lost first his dignity, then his free-speech lawsuit, and finally, apparently, his mind. And now none of it can be returned to him, nor can the lives of his victims be returned to their loved ones. He will be vilified, without a doubt. But I hope that somehow, beyond that blame, we might also finally hear his side, and learn some hard lessons from this tragic, senseless episode.

Was he really promised work that was not delivered? If so, why? If not, what happened that made him believe he had been?

Who did get the work he thought he was getting? Were those contractors connected to anyone in City Hall in any way? How many contractors on those jobs were minority-owned and/or Kirkwood-based businesses?

What was the basis of other disputes he had with the city - did any of them have any merit?

Were the parking violations for which he was cited the only ones being enforced? Are code violations typically enforced equally between Meacham Park and the rest of Kirkwood?

These are some of the questions I hope the media will strive to answer - not to lay blame for these deaths anywhere but at the feet of Cookie Thorton - he and he alone took those lives. Rather to determine if any of his frustration was justified, and if so, to begin a real and public discussion on changes that might mitigate such feelings in the future.

I believe this kind of discussion would be much more productive, if also more painful, than whether or not metal detectors should be installed in the city office buildings. If our laws are not enforced consistently and fairly, the laws shouldn’t exist in the first place. If enforcement is used not judicially, but instead to silence, drive out or otherwise harass citizens on the fringes of our communities, we step away from democracy into a chaos that will ultimately swallow us all.

This article, by Ann J. Simonton of Common Dreams recommends that we slow down in order to better appreciate, absorb and enjoy all aspects of life.

It isn’t just fast food that reminds us fast is not always better. The frantic pace of everyday life seems to impede our ability to make changes that are increasingly necessary for a sustainable future. Many have begun to realize that a primary step toward positive social change is to slow down. Cutting edge groups like Canada’s Adbusters have been promoting Slow Week to encourage SLOW as means to enjoy and prioritize all aspects of life.

She recommends that part of slowing down should include having slower sex:

The media landscape is clearly bloated with highly processed sex. High in fat content, in terms of the lies it tells. High in calories, in terms of the burden it places on the possibility of real intimacy. It does not celebrate the beauty of imperfection, the vulnerability of tenderness and shared experience. It hasn’t time for, or interest in empathic communication about respective desires and boundaries. At best it sets people up for misunderstanding and disappointment-at worst for rape and abuse.

Slow sex is not a condemnatory movement, but a movement toward informed pleasure. It isn’t about forcing change but about providing a fair and reasoned platform to address difficult questions about how the culture promotes sexual intimacy, with the caveat to do no harm.

There was a tragedy in Kirkwood Missouri last night.  A madman opened fire on a City Council meeting in Kirkwood Missouri, killing five people. That was last night. 

I was riding my bike through Kirkwood today, and I happened to travel past the Kirkwood City Hall.  It was about 1:00 pm and the media were out there, forcused on the City Hall as though there were hostages being held in the City Hall.  As if they were photographing something interesting.

But there was nothing happening at City Hall, at least nothing visible.  The crime was quickly committed last night and the criminal was shot at the scene.  But this striking scene of the media doing it’s thing gives us an idea of what it is to report “news” these days.   There were dozens of cameras, lots of hustle and bustle and at least three news babes –they were quite busy primping before going on the air (you need to have your hair perfectly in place to tell the complicated story of a deranged man shooting 5 people the day before). 

They were taking pictures of the Kirkwood City Hall–using it as a backdrop for the sensational stories they were writing. 

Here’s a headline for them:  Kirkwood City Hall still exists!    

Too bad the meda doesn’t spend 10% of this effort on the hundreds of lies told by the Bush Administration and the thousands of resulting deaths in Iraq.

Apparently, the media prefer simple stories like this one:  a crazy man kills some people in front of a bunch of witnesses.  Yep, that’s an easy story.  Bring in dozens of cameras and lots of reporters so we can get to the bottom of this.

With the possible spoiler of Mike Huckabee, it’s clear that John McCain is set to be the candidate the Democrats need to beat in November. The irony of the ongoing battle between Hillary and Obama is that, policy-wise, they just aren’t that different. There were some real differences between the Republicans, but those differences are not what McCain seems to be gearing up to run on. He is all about Iraq.

McCain has to convince hardline conservatives that he’s their guy. Why? Because he has occasionally backed some responsible legislation, like McCain-Feingold. He refused to sugarcoat our waning industrial possibilities while campaigning in Michigan. He has spoken positively about amnesty programs for illegal immigrants. He has not always been a friend to Big Business. True Red Republicans of the Bush League see the potential for fiscal treason in McCain—that he might raise taxes, control campaign spending, or propose, back, and sign Democratic-sounding legislation that would take the country toward *gasp* Socialism.

I have a hard time squaring complaints from anyone that McCain is somehow not a fiscal conservative when Bush just put forward a three-point-one TRILLION dollar budget (with the largest slice for defense spending since WWII). It just goes to show, all the rhetoric about Democratic profligacy is really just a complaint that the Dems spend the money on things the Republicans don’t like. It’s not the money, it’s the programs.

Setting that aside, though, McCain obviously doesn’t think he can sway them all. So he’s about to start campaigning hard on the pitfalls of an Iraq withdrawal. I will wait for the P-word to rear its ugly torso—Patriotism. The suggestion will be made that anyone wishing to pull out is somehow not patriotic. We saw this under Bush, aspersions cast on some of the most loyal, patriotic, and demonstrably courageous people who suggested that maybe this war was a bad idea and that, furthermore, we more or less screwed it up by going in blind, deaf, and predetermined.

I hear echoes of the Sixties all over again, and of all the people who should know better, it is John McCain. (”Pull out…doesn’t sound manly to me, Bub. I say leave it in there till the job is done and they’re thoroughly messed up.”)

The problem is, this may well play for the American voter. When we have serious doubts, we tend to stick with what we’re doing rather than risk change. We have to have our faces rubbed in the muck of bad decision-making before we finally say—in sufficient numbers to matter—enough is enough. I am not sanguine about the political maturity of the American people.

And the thing is, we aren’t getting our faces rubbed in it. We’re adapting. Gasoline is high, the American industrial base is shrinking, we have infrastructure problems galore, but we’re making accommodations and doing fine, thank you. People complain, but by and large we haven’t actually lost anything that matters. So much of this debate is still in the realm of hypotheticals, theories, ideas, and potentials.

So we look to the Democratic candidates and what do we see? One old school politician who would probably do a fine enough job and maybe make a few worthwhile changes, mainly around the edges, and one young firebrand who is promising Big Changes. And a serious look at their policies shows that, really, they differ by degrees, not ideas. It’s going to devolve into a popularity and demographics battle. Which barrier do we want to break first? Gender or race? And underlying that, is the question no one wants to ask: does it really matter anymore?

In my misbegotten youth, I used to be what they call a Single Issue Voter. Was a time I voted against anyone who wanted to erode the Second Amendment. Yes, I was one of those Right to Bear Arms purists. I had bought into the argument that an armed populace kept the government in line and the first step towards tyranny is to disarm the population at large. There’s truth to that in history, but today, here, in this country, it’s a rather weak argument. Power doesn’t work that way. Not to say it couldn’t, but for now it simply doesn’t.

I could also argue that anyone wishing to tamper with the Constitution was de facto untrustworthy. Which may also be true. People doing good for me whether I want it or not is loathesome. Make the subject anything but guns and you see this immediately.

But the truth is, single issue voting only means you’re not informed, interested, or intellectually capable of understanding multiple issues. Or it means you don’t care about anything else, which is just as bad. It is stupid.

As it has transpired, most of the Second Amendment purists voted into office in the last forty years have also brought with them a whole suite of ideologies I cannot abide. They are, many of them, the natural constituency of the George W. Bush League. That single issue—preserving an unquestioned right to own, carry, and by implication use something which I, in fact, do not own or carry—comes packaged with people whose other policy positions I find absurd or dangerous.

The word Balance comes to mind. Tricky at the best of times.

McCain will campaign on a single issue. Oh, there will be other policy positions he’ll talk about and want to deal with, but at present it looks like he’s going to threaten America with the awful prospect of “pulling out” if we vote for the Democrats. He will polarize people over a Single Issue that will push all the rest to the side in an emotional gambit to convince us to—wait for it, he may yet use the phrase—Stay The Course.

In such an environment, the first casualty is reason. You can’t even get close to truth without that.

I would really like to see the two Democratic front-runners make a deal, put together a ticket that can roll over this irrationalism. The Republicans are once again demonstrating their major strength—they’re forming ranks and closing up behind a candidate and they will see it through as a group. For a bunch of people who profess to believe in American Individuality, they sure can cast it aside quickly enough for their Cause. Democrats traditionally devour each other.

The one factor we have left to see whether McCain has a reasonable shot or not is who he picks as a running mate. Because that will indicate who he thinks his successor will be, ought to be. As it appears right now, if Hilary and Obama made a deal and ran together, it would be the best of all possible worlds. Either one of them is acceptable to me.

I suppose I should say whether I think we should get out of Iraq. Saying— believing—that we should never have gone in to begin with is not the same thing. Now it would be like making a mess of a paraplegic’s kitchen, then leaving without cleaning up the mess. So I guess I’m forced into the opinion that we would be ill-advised to simply pull out until Iraq really does have a security base that works well enough. Otherwise, they will be divvied up by the various factions outside their borders. Iran has, in fact, an old score to settle, and they are more dangerous to future peace in the region than Iraq ever was. Saddam ultimately was just greedy. The Iranian hierarchy are Inspired.

But that doesn’t mean I’d vote for John McCain—all the other things he’s bringing to the table are things I do not really support.

Single Issue Voting is for morons.

It was a bloody night in Kirkwood Missouri tonight.  I live about twelve miles from Kirkwood, Missouri, which is normally a peaceful community.  At tonight’s meeting at the Kirkwood City Hall, however, things would be different.  And armed man, apparently a lunatic, barged into the Kirkwood City Council meeting and shot seven people attending the meeting, killing five of them.  the scene was depicted in detail by a newspaper reporter who happened to be at the meeting:

“He came from the back of the room,” said Janet McNichols, the correspondent. “He kept something about, ‘Shoot the mayor’ and he just walked around shooting anybody he could.”

McNichols said the shooter first fired at Tom Ballman, a police officer at the meeting. She said she looked up to see the officer shot in the head.

Thornton then targeted Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, who was sitting in front of McNichols. He was also hit in the head, she said.

“After that, I was on my stomach under the chairs,” she said. “I laid on my stomach waiting to get shot. Oh God, it was a horror.”

McNichols said Thornton continued to yell about the mayor, and from his voice and the gunshots, she could tell he had approached the dais at the front of the room where the council sits behind a semicircular desk.

At some point he fired at City Attorney John Hessel, who told McNichols he fended the attacker off by throwing chairs.

When many people hear of these sorts of incidents, they think about how horrible it is and how this sort of thing should never happen.  I agree with those sentiments, but I inevitably have another thought that I find more disturbing.  When I hear of these sorts of incidents I am almost always surprised that they don’t happen more often than they do.  Why would I say that? 

Because we live in a society of almost 300 million people, many of whom are living on the edge, financially and psychologically.  We live among too many people who have become socially isolated.  We live among millions of people who are suffering mental illness who are not getting treatment.  We live among numerous people who feel victimized for numerous reasons, and who look to government as one of the main culprits.

If you doubt that there are so many people on the edge, I suggest that you walk the sidewalks and streets of your city more often and look into the faces of the people you will pass.  Yes, most of them will be normal people, friendly people.  But one out of a hundred people have that look that they have been pushed to the edge of desperation.  Many of them violently take out their frustrations on their own spouses and children, in private.  But once in a while, one of them will take a loaded weapon into a place where peaceful people are meeting to seek what appears to them to be revenge.  After all, anyone pushed to a higher level of desperation can justify that anyone they decide to shoot deserved to be shot.

Combine this huge population of desperate people with the easy availability of weapons, plus the ubiquitous images of violence on television, and the situation become all the more volatile, it would seem. 

In no way am I justifying the actions of the madman who killed those five innocent people tonight.  On the other hand, I am truly amazed that more people don’t act in similar fashion more often. I am at a loss to explain why it doesn’t happen more often.  Many people assume that the status quo is some sort of floor, as though things can only get better.  If that’s optimism, it’s naive optimism.  The status quo isn’t any sort of floor unless we work hard to make it a floor.  I’m not convinced that we’re working hard enough to nurture and rejuvenate the all-too-many desperate souls currently walking the streets.

I thank my lucky stars that events like tonight don’t happen 100 times or 1000 times every night, from coast to coast.

See this post from Free Press to learn more about the big gift the FCC just handed to huge media corporations:

On Feb. 4, the Federal Communications Commission finally released the details of the devastating rule change it voted on back in December. These new rules would allow one company to own both a major newspaper and a radio or TV station in the same media market – tossing out a ban on “cross-ownership” that has been in place for more than 30 years.

The new rules have gone from bad to worse since FCC Chairman Kevin Martin put forward his proposal in a New York Times op-ed and companion press release. The final published rules amount to wine for Big Media, which will get rich off the public airwaves, and vinegar for the public who will be left with less diversity and competition in their local news.

Let’s be clear about one thing from the start. Martin wants us to believe that these new rules represent a “modest” relaxation of the longstanding newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban. But there’s nothing modest about this major handout for Big Media. The final text makes clear the extent to which the FCC has abandoned its mission to protect the public interest.

This despicable behavior by the FCC is nothing new.  For details about the sordid manner in which Michael Powell (past Chairman) and now, Kevin Martin, have abandoned the public’s interest in a fair and vigorous media see here and consider reading Chapter 9 of Eric Klinenberg’s detailed investigation of the FCC, Fighting for Air (2007). 

Remember, however, that the FCC is not entirely under the control of big media corporations.  FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein are among my modern day heros, as a result of their non-stop (often successful) efforts to fight off self-interested and well-moneyed media corporations. 

I realized this very recently, when several factors forced gender into awareness. In a psychology course a few quarters back, the professor asked the class to list the groups to which we each thought we belonged. My list looked something like this: “Student; Intellectual; Atheist; Independent; Skeptic; Young Adult”. As students read off their answers, I noticed a big glaring gap in my own response: gender. Most women had mentioned that they saw themselves as “women”. In fact, “women” was usually the group at the top of the list. I wrote this off as an example of how much I value my intellectual life over my more superficial life-on-paper. Or something.

Then one day, I became ensnared in one of my Hillary-Clinton-supporting roommate’s little tirades about women and power. He considers himself a big feminist, and he loves powerful women and the gender questions it creates. At one point he said something like, “When people look at you as a a woman-” and I quickly, instinctively replied, “But I don’t really think of myself as a woman.” He seemed to understand what I meant instantly- I see myself as a person.
(more…)

I believe that a strong foundation of critical thinking, innovation, curiousity about the natural world, rigorous adherence to non-biased exploration, and a bent toward problem solving is part of what has made our country great. I think science, when at its best, fosters those characteristics, and can help us continue on a forward path. Science can point us in a direction that helps not only our nation, but our planet as well - including the economy, the global economy.

Under the present US administration science has taken a beating, which is not just a bad thing for science, but for all of us in pretty much any way I can think about. Social issues, jobs, medicine, quality of life, energy, jobs, everything we do is informed by how we see the world and we interact with it.

Please get behind this - a call for public debate where presidential candidates will discuss views on this important topic. Such a debate will reveal important information about how they view science, what it means to explore our planet, and the importance they place on this endeavor.

I think our lives depend on it.

What is the “it” referenced above?  “It” is the rich subjective experience of consciousness.  There’s nothing else quite like consciousness, right?  

Writing in Seed Magazine, Nicholas Humphrey suggests that, perhaps, consciousness is “not such a big deal.”

OK, but what is consciousness?  Why do we see the vivid redness of that ripe tomato?  Using the jargon of cognitive scientists, why are there qualia?  Is consciousness a difficult topic?  Absolutely.  “It” has the world’s greatest cognitive scientists stumped.  Humphrey reminds us why they are stumped: “We cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution.”  But at least, we might plead, tell us what consciousness is for?  Humphrey suggests that Jerry Fodor asked the right question when he asked: “Why did God—or rather natural selection—make consciousness?”  This is where Humphrey raises an interesting suggestion:

I’d suggest the reason [Fodor] finds it all so baffling is that he is starting off with the completely wrong premise, for he has assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English.

Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

Perhaps Humphrey is onto something.  Then again, his suggestion would seem to make consciousness of those things of which we are intensely interested a spandrel (to use the term of Stephen Jay Gould), a phenotypic characteristic that is considered to have developed during evolution as a side-effect of a true adaptation. It’s really hard to imagine that the image and smell of that steamy piece apple pie I’m about to eat is all gratuitous–that icing on a cake is just biological icing on the cake! It’s hard to imagine that the qualia associated with sex–the soft ruby lips of that woman I’m about to kiss or the sound of her affectionate whispers–play no role in furthering natural selection. Is Humphrey really suggesting that consciousness is evolutionarily important only to the extent that it guides our actions regarding pie and lovers that are not within easy reach?

How would we test Humphrey’s theory? 

[W]e will need evidence as to how being phenomenally conscious changes our worldview: What beliefs and attitudes flow from it? What changes occur in the way conscious individuals think about who and what they are?

Humphrey is an optimist.  He writes, “There is every reason to think the truth about consciousness will eventually be discovered by scientific investigation.” 

Like Humphrey, I’m a big fan of science, but consciousness is such a strange “thing” that I lack Humphrey’s optimism that science will ever get its arms around the topic, certainly not in my lifetime.  As I wrote at the top of this post, there just isn’t anything quite like consciousness.  There just doesn’t seem to be any place for old Archimedes to stand . . .

Does anyone really know the answer? Ever?

That’s the point of this excerpt from a short essay by novelist Harlan Ellison:

. . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we have done any particular thing, whether it’s buying T-bills or why we would live in a house in the mountains or why we took the trip to Lake Ronkonkoma, or whatever it was, the only rationale that ever rings with honesty is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We’re really no smarter than cactus or wolverines or plankton; and the things we do, we always like to justify them, find logical reasons for them; and then you go to court later and the judge says, “Well, didn’t you know that it was doomed from the start?” I’m waiting for someone to say to the judge, “Because, schmuck, I’m no smarter than you.”

From A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love, Compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, p. 50 (1991).

Justin E.H. Smith at 3quarksdaily reports that the leading Byelorussian newspaper has come out in support of Sen. Obama.

The Belaruskija Naviny had this to say about Obama’s rival:

Even in Soviet times we had saying: “The Woman: it is also Person!”  In Belarus, we have many women in political offices… In Belarus, we are not afraid of a woman in place of power.  Now Hillary Clinton had eight years already in White House.  During that time, she set herself one goal: the creation of new polyclinics throughout America, for the promotion of health and hygiene, from Poultry Processing Plant “John Tyson” in State Missouri to High Technology Cybernetics Park “Bill Gates” in State Washington, to public high school “Martin Luther King” in City Oakland.  But how many polyclinics emerged from her time in the White House? There are no more polyclinics in America now than during Great Depression. Instead Clinton left America with the “health’s management organizations,” with queues of length we have not seen in Belarus since Great War for Fatherland, and costs that are sure to make any patient “sick.” Americans should be asking to Candidate Clinton: where are the polyclinics?  Where can I go for antibiotics or a mustard plaster when I fall ill?  Where can I go to pasteurize my children?

Indeed. Where can I go for a mustard plaster when I fall ill? This is a question I ask myself daily.

I’m not usually a fan of Borat-style humor, but Justin Smith is a better writer than Sascha Baron-Cohen. You can find more of Smith’s writing here. Kind of Will Self meets Franz Kafka meets something else.

I’d never seen anything like this before (I learned about it after reading a post at SoupyTrumpet). It’s a song based on a speech Barack Obama delivered in New Hampshire on January 8, 2008. The music is performed by will.i.am of the rap group Black Eyed Peas, assisted by a large ensemble:

Jesse Dylan, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, Tatyana Ali, Nick Cannon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, John Legend, Kate Walsh, Aisha Tyler, Amber Valletta, Taryn Manning, Nicole Scherzinger, Adam Rodriguez, Alfonso Ribeiro, Austin Nichols, Ed Kowalczyk, Eric Balfour, Esthero, Harold Perrineau, Johnathon Schaech, Kelly Hu, Maya Rubin, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

The video was obviously the result of an incredible job of editing, as well as a highly coordinated performance. Somehow, despite all of the technical hurdles faced by the performers and technicians, the video is also, at its core, musical. I’m not the only one impressed; the video has more than one million views on YouTube, despite being posted a couple days ago.

[Note: SoupyTrumpet http://soupytrumpet.com/ is a new site run by the designer of this site, Nick Smith.]

I learned of the issue of “downer cows” by reading a report on Common Dreams:

You wouldn’t think you could “spin” a video that shows slaughterhouse workers electric shocking downer cows, “water boarding” them, jabbing their eyes with herding paddles and ramming them with forklift blades while they squeal in pain, posted at www.hsus.org, but USDA is trying.

Bad enough the slaughterhouse, Hallmark Meat Packing Co. in Chino, CA, supplies the National School Lunch Program, a certain portion of children have already eaten the meat.

This disturbing report caused me to visit the Human Society site, where I made myself watch the video.  What assurance can I ever have that the next hamburger I might eat is not from an animal treated like this?

I attended Barack Obama’s speech in St. Louis on Saturday night.  I was among a numerous other people attending — the press reported that about 20,000 people were present. To get into the arena, those attending had to follow the line for several blocks, leading up to the door.  We walked past about a dozen sign-waving Ron Paul supporters on the way in. 

Political rallies are often of high energy and this was no exception.  Obama appeared at 9:00 pm, as promised, and delivered a spirited one-hour speech.  He is undoubtedly a talented orator.  He is charismatic in a thoughtful way.  In case you’re interested in his positions on the issues, here is his website.

I tried to take some photos at the gathering, but I was just too far away.   Luckily, a friend sent me an email with some photos his wife took.  I thought that these were terrific photos, well worth sharing.  She gave me permission to use these photos here.    Without further ado, here are three photos from Barack Obama’s February 2, 2008 speech in St. Louis, Missouri:

We don’t attend to everything we see. As Andy Clark has written in Natural Born Cyborgs, our brains don’t bother to create rich inner models of the world. We can’t create such models because there is simply too much information out there for us to process it all. Further, the world is generally available to revisit periodically, so why bother? In other words, we use the world as its own best model–we “cheat” (because we must cheat). But this cheating can be exposed through dramatic experiments. I’ve previously posted on some of those experiments here (by Quirkology).

Here are some additional experiments demonstrating our need to “cheat.” In this experiment, done by Dan Simons and Dan Levin, only 50% of the subjects noticed that the person to whom they were talking had changed. Here are additional demonstrations by Simons, along with a bit of explanation. Here’s a more elaborate write-up on the “door” experiment. And see here. When I use the word “cheat,” I’m being facetious. Our strategy of using the world as an adequate model is one of the many cognitive heuristics we must use in order to survive.

Here is a another good example of “change blindness” for me (I’ll put the answer at the bottom of this post, in case you’d like to try it). This example (and these) were assembled by Ronald Resnick. At this site, he explains that we need to attend in order to see change.

A related topic is our obliviousness to incremental change. That was the subject of my post about the disappearance of tigers. Here are several dramatic demonstrations of our inability to notice gradual changes [watch them in real time; if you don't notice the changes --I didn't--grab the "knob" on the progress bar and slide it quickly].

I’ve often considered the moral an political ramification of our limited ability to attend to all of our surroundings. That we focus on some things to the exclusion of others, and that we are limited in our ability to attend to all of our surroundings, makes us susceptible to many bad arguments. This susceptibility is dramatic because we also carry around a prejudice that we have full knowledge (or, at least, adequate knowledge) where ever we go. We are epistemologically cocky, and this makes us vulnerable. We can be led to focus only on some data, to the exclusion of other data. Magicians take good advantage of this tendency. So do some politicians, who lead us to focus only on human differences, rather than the vast number of things humans have in common (Bill Clinton once gave a moving speech on this issue). I’ve long believed that attentional frailties, combined with fatigue and the illusion of adequate knowledge, are the battleground for many moral and political issues.

[Hint: The airplane engine disappears].

In his post on our obliviousness to incremental changes, Erich referenced the great migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the 20th century. It was one of those pivotal changes that went almost unnoticed at the time.

A few days before Erich’s post, I picked up Floris-Jan Van Luyn’s A Floating City of Peasants: The Great Migration in Contemporary China at my local bookstore. Synchronicity?

The book contains very moving profiles and photographs of a handful of the some 120 million peasants who have left rural villages to find work in China’s larger cities since the 1990’s. This is not a “story” that gets much coverage in our press, but it’s one of the most history-changing events of recent times, in my opinion.

I urge everyone to take a look at this book, and then contemplate how much of the daily stuff of our lives here in the US owes to these people and their hopes and sufferings. Our national debt is being financed by China, out of wealth created by these migrant workers living for the most part without basic human rights or protections.

China’s development is bound to have major environmental consequences as well. In 2005/6, there were explosive protests against pollution and environmental degradation in rural China. Since then, there has been little news, but whether this has because the movement has been repressed, or that the Chinese government has succeeded in banning the international press from protests, I don’t know.I don’t have any answers or solutions or big pronouncements about globalization or economic/environmental justice right now. I’d simply like to advocate for attention over oblivion to what’s going on in China. The 2008 Olympics will certainly deliver a huge dose of spectacle, not exactly what’s needed.

Finally, continuing the the theme of one of my recent posts, Van Luyn includes in the book a calligraphy fragment from Yan Jun, a poet/musician in the underground music scene in Beijing. The piece is called “Against All Organized Deception.” I can’t find out much more about Yan Jun and his music or poetry, but you have to love the title.

Fred Kaplan’s has written a new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He argues that George W. Bush’s failures stem from two great misconceptions: A) that the world changed after Sept. 11, when it didn’t, and B) that the United States emerged from the Cold War stronger than before, when in fact it was weaker. Here’s what I found especially interesting (from Part I of excerpts of this book published by Slate.com):

If America’s Cold War presidents had adopted Bush’s strategic post-9/11 strategic outlook, they would have attacked the Soviet Union at some point during the long standoff, on the grounds that Communism was the “root cause” of many problems. If Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had thought the way Bush did while planning the strategy for World War II, they would not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to beat Nazi Germany, because Communism, especially Josef Stalin’s version of it, was evil, too. They might even have declared war on both Russia and Germany—and, in their high moral dudgeon, suffer catastrophic defeat.

The great divide in thinking about American foreign policy these past few years is not so much between Realists and Neoconservatives; it’s between realists (with a small r) and fantasists.

You be the judge. This project was instigated by Discover Magazine and hosted by Brian Greene.

For a world-class prank, check this out:

The group is called “Improv Everywhere: We cause scenes.” This group obviously has a lot of fun, yet takes their work seriously. Check out its website — the right column lists the group’s other “missions” (they indicate that they’ve had about 70 missions so far).

The other missions include “Suicide Jumper”, synchronized swimming and “No Pants 2K8″ (On Saturday January 12th, 2008 nearly 2,000 people took off their pants on subways in 10 cities around the world).

For the other missions by Improv Everywhere, check the Mission Highlights here.

Economic Soft Landing
John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

Bush Helping the Elderly
Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria

Hate Radio
Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

Conservatives and McCain Play Chicken
Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com

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