The recent rains have rising tides. A friend of mine sent the following frazzled missive this morn:

“… been busy and intense here… Spent two days moving everything under the house and in the shed, up to my porches… full now of STUFF…. STUFF… everywhere… water is 5 feet deep now under the house… expected crest… I hope not over right under the floor boards… I hope… very very close…. what a mess… could come inside… questions about the exact final height…. here… hope not….. talk to you later… ” [all ellipses in the original]

His house is on the Meramec River. More on it today than usual. He also lives just across that river from the Times Beach community of 1980’s dioxin fame. Certainly washed clean, by now.

His hope, you may have gathered, is that the flood peaks before it rises above his floor boards. Right now, the issue is in question. This may be a new record flood level in the area, and his house was only built on 100 year flood stilts.

This Discover article (”20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex”) will provide you with ample (scientific) information to make you the center of attention at the next party you attend.  

Most American media tells you nothing at all about what’s happening to real people on the ground.  This lack of information is astounding, given the Bush Administration’s constant claims of “success” in Iraq.   I’m tired of reading sterilized accounts of life in the Green Zone.   I really want to know what we are getting for the $13 billion we spend on the Iraq occupation each month.

At the recommendation of an article in Salon Premium (”The unsung heroes of Iraq war coverage“), I have now found what I’ve been looking for:  a blog called “Inside Iraq,” which is

updated by Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy Newspapers. They are based in Baghdad and outlying provinces. These are firsthand accounts of their experiences. Their complete names are withheld for security purposes.

At Inside Iraq I have finally found voices that sound authentic who are telling me about the real lives of real people who live in Iraq. The words of these journalists are written in plain English, but they’re difficult to read on an emotional level.  I plan to visit this site regularly.

When I saw this article at MSNBC, I thought it was a joke.   But no, it was no joke.  Check out the photo.   Apparently, 30 men and one woman residing in the Philippines actually had themselves nailed to crosses.  They went through the Good Friday rites

in three villages in northern Pampanga province’s San Fernando city. Five other devotees, including a woman, were nailed to crosses in nearby Bulacan province.

The people going through this procedure were trying to cure loved ones of disease as well as purportedly trying to “atone for their sins” (whatever that often-uttered phrase might actually mean–it’s apparently an attempt to invoke the moral accounting metaphor elaborated by Lakoff and Johnson).

Here’s definitely a place where religion and science diverge.  Imagine Alexander Fleming in his lab trying to understand the properties of penicillin, all of a sudden inspired with an alternate method for curing sick people.  

“Quick!” he yells to his lab assistant (in a Scottish accent).   “Nail me to a cross to help heal sick people!”   

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not knocking this crucifixion method of curing people.  Maybe it works.  Maybe hospitals should have corridors filled with crucifixes where patients and their relatives can all be nailed up in order to get cured.   Since it would be relatively cheap to administer this treatment (some of the sadistic contractors working for our government in Iraq and Guantanamo would be happy to do this work), insurers would probably be happy to waive the co-pay.

After considerable thought, I hereby offer my predictions for the 2008 Major League Baseball season.   Unlike other prognosticators, I guarantee my predictions.  Therefore, feel free to bet large amounts of money that each of the following will occur, for certain, during the 2008 MBL season:

Unabashed optimism will surround the ritual of spring training.

Thousands of dignitaries and celebrities will show up at Opening Day baseball games to be seen.

Columnists will crank out thousands of articles on baseball, each of them suggesting that following Major League Baseball is important to the overall scheme of life.

Some young relatively unknown baseball players will impress the fans this year.

Some of the high-priced veterans will not do as well as the fans hoped and the fans will grumble, many of them expressing their displeasure at length on sports radio call-in shows, arguing that those players are washed up, on drugs, too old or slackers.

Millions of fans will go to the baseball stadiums, willingly paying thousands of dollars to attend baseball games and to buy outrageously over-priced beer and nachos (at least $170 for a family of four).  Thousands of these fans will be named Daniel, Robert, Michael, James, Mary, Susan, Karen, Linda or Donna.

During each MLB game, the fans will be subjected to an unending stream of advertising in the form of videos, posters and PA announcements.

Each team will play about 162 games, totaling about 2,500 games. [Note: Scientists have calculated that each team should play 256 games each to make certain that the truly best team ends up with the best record.]

The “great” teams will lose about 60 games each.   “Horrible” teams will nonetheless win about 60 games each.

Fans will continue to call the playoff finale the “World Series,” even though teams from only two countries will be invited.

Huge numbers of fans who have no athletic talent will buy expensive sports jerseys bearing the names of baseball players who are athletically gifted.

Some of the players will set obscure records this year, yet this will nonetheless be deemed important enough to discuss by baseball announcers.

Thousands of drunk fans will get into fist fights that begin when one of the drunk fans insults the other fan’s team by saying something like “Your team sucks.”

Players who are being interviewed by the media will employ an endless stream of clichés and platitudes. (more…)

I refuse to use the term “war” when referring to the U.S. occupation of Iraq for these reasons.

Do you remember the many politicians and news media personalities who assured us that we needed to go to “war” with Iraq and that it would be easy, fast and relatively painless for American soldiers?   Well, Huffpo has put many of those quotes in one convenient place, breaking them into basic categories, such as:

CAKEWALK!

HOW MANY TROOPS WILL BE NEEDED?

WHAT ABOUT CASUALTIES?

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?  and HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

Here are some key quotes from “How long will it last?”:

“Now, it isn’t gong to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either.”
- Richard Perle, Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, 7/11/02

“The idea that it’s going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990. Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
- Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 11/15/02

“It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could be six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
- Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 2/7/03

“It won’t take weeks… Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there’s no question that it will.”
- Bill O’Reilly, 2/10/03

“There is zero question that this military campaign…will be reasonably short. … Like World War II for about five days.”
- General Barry R. McCaffrey, national security and terrorism analyst for NBC News, 2/18/03

“Our military superiority is so great — it’s far greater than it was in the Gulf War, and the Gulf War was over in 100 hours after we bombed for 43 days… Now they can bomb for a couple of days and then just roll into Baghdad… The odds are there’s going to be a war and it’s going to be not for very long.”
- Former President Bill Clinton, 3/6/03

“I think it will go relatively quickly…weeks rather than months.”
- Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/16/03

We must remember that these aren’t mere words.  Saying these sorts of words had consequences that many people still don’t seem to appreciate (given that many of the people who pushed a “war” with Iraq now want to start a “war” with Iran).   Glenn Greenwald wrote about this moral obtuseness of many of those people who led the charge to invade Iraq:

The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them — either in Slate or elsewhere — even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn’t exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

According to this ABC News report, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science allows private tours for children so that the displays can be properly interpreted to keep them from accepting the displayed, scientifically derived explanations as true.

Yes, the actual science displays are being specially interpreted to support Young Earth and Divine Creation theology. It certainly is cheaper than busing all those kids all the way to Kentucky for the Creation Museum tour.

The tour guides

dismiss much of what’s on display in the museum as “pseudo-science” and describe many of the graphic depictions of paleontology and evolution as merely “artwork.”

They get the children to recite that “Evolution is just a religion”.

The creators of this tour

“are now training other people around the country to hold similar tours at their local museums, and they are also putting together tour materials for Christian teachers.

Is it just me, or is something wrong with our education system, in general?

Barack Obama has challenged Americans to rise above trite cartoonish conceptions of race.

The full text of Obama’s thought-provoking and impassioned speech can be read here.

Are Americans ready for a candidate who dares to challenge them? Are they ready for a candidate who speaks comfortably of the complexities of race as he has previously spoken of the complexities of religious belief? I truly hope so.

What is America’s basic choice? Here are Obama’s words:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

I enjoy chatting with Martian anthropologists.  They visit Earth without preconceptions and they ask obvious questions. 

Recently, I encountered a Martian anthropologist who was struggling to understand what Easter was all about.    I tried to explain it in simple terms.  I first tried to tell the Martian Anthropologist (I think it was a “she,” so I’ll use the feminine pronoun) about Good Friday. I told her that a magic fellow named Jesus dies every year on Good Friday and the Christians get all glum, even though He doesn’t really die every year, and we’re not entirely sure that there was a Jesus or that he was truly magic.

I paused, then explained further.  I told her that Catholics are my favorite kind of Christians because I was raised Catholic and because they strive so hard to not eat meat on Good Friday.  She asked why they didn’t eat meat and I said I didn’t know, especially since they eat fish and fish seems to be meat.  At church, it gets even stranger, I explained.  Catholics eat bread that they claim was ”transubstantiated” into the actual body of Jesus (even though it still looks and tastes like bread.  The ironic twist is that this bread is supposedly meat and the Catholics eat it on Good Friday, even though they promise not to eat meat on Good Friday. 

Then, every year on Easter Sunday Jesus is said to rise from the dead and save us, even though we weren’t the one’s who pissed off God by trying to eat fruit from the tree that would help us understand things better.   I needed to clarify.  Actually, Jesus only saves some people.  Any people who doubt that Jesus was God are forced to go to hell, a place where they are cursed with eternal suffering rather than being allowed to die.   I told her that I’m one of those people because I don’t understand why God had to allow his son to be killed in order to save us, even though we didn’t commit “original sin.”  What’s hard for Martian anthropologists to grasp is that good-hearted people who doubt that Jesus was God also go to hell, despite being good-hearted, which is the core teaching of Jesus.

The Martian Anthropologist, hearing of this powerful and sometimes sadistic God, told me that she didn’t want to have anything to do with churches.  Getting to close to anything religious just sounded much too dangerous to her.   I told her that religion was important to humans because it scares them too, and keeps them from hurting each other except when they start wars where they argue about things like whether the mother of Jesus ever had sex.   She told me that human societies were “interesting.”   Then she asked why humans don’t simply try harder to be nice to one another rather than believe in life after death, and other forms of magic.  I told her that I didn’t know. 

Then she asked me to tell her about eggs and marshmallow chickens.  I immediately recognized that she wanted to know what Americans really believed rather than what they said they believed.  Therefore, off we went to Walgreen’s to fully understand the florescent American holiday of Easter.

She asked what Jesus had to do with Easter baskets and whether God the Father was named “Disney.”   I told her that I just didn’t know either of these things.  She asked whether there were bunnies at the manger or at the crucifixion.  I didn’t know.   Does the Bible talk about coloring eggs 2,000?  I didn’t know.

(more…)

“There is no evidence whatsoever that flowering plants evolved.”  

Answers In Genesis

I can understand this resistance to believing that orchids evolved without the help of God-the-Artist.  I understood this resistance while strolling through an extraordinary display of orchids today at the Missouri Botanical Garden.   

It was like looking at fireworks.  Just when you thought you had seen it all, you would see yet another dazzling package of color and shape.  Why would “Nature” waste such time on crafting such masterpieces?  For those primed by a religious upbringning, the emotions would compel the thought that flowers of this type must be no less than “God’s” aesthetic gift to Humankind.

Such thinking, of course, is prevalent among creationists.  Prevalent and wrong.   Not that orchids sculpted by natural selection are any less stunning in appearance that those that might have been crafted by an omniscent deity.   They are what they are.  They are compelling beings, those orchids.  They are beautiful and they are alive.   And they can be appreciated by anyone, of any world view, who comes to view them.  I imagine that, today, many creationists lined up with those who are convinced by evolutionary theory, all of them appreciating the orchids. 

Viewing this orchid display reminded me of Darwin’s writings regarding the many versions of finches Darwin observed on his trip to the Galapagos.   Regarding those finches, Darwin concluded that, in geographical isolation, the various species of finches evolved from a small number of common ancestors so that each species was thus modified to suit “different ends.”  Darwin’s conclusion that the species of finches specialized due to geographical isolation was key to the development of his theory of natural selection.  

Darwin studied orchids carefully after publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.  Darwin later published a book called On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and the Good Effects of Intercrossing.  Rather than argue that the beauty of orchids was God’s effort to please humans, Darwin argued that the various species of flowers were honed by natural selection to attract specific types of insect cross-pollinators.   Incredibly, there are more than 22,000 known species of orchids.

The following excerpt, published by Nature (on the PBS site) notes the significance of orchids to Darwin:  (more…)

Putting one’s life description into only six words is the subject of a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning.

This review published in The New Yorker gives you the flavor:

It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day. That’s two, three words a minute. “We almost crashed,” an editor said. Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap”; “Woman Seeks Men—High Pain Threshold”). The editors have culled the best. And, happily, spliced in celebrity autobiographies: “Canada freezing. Gotham beckons. Hello, Si!” “Well, I thought it was funny.” “Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs.”

[Visit Amazon "Search Inside" for a peak at some more examples]. 

Many of these six-word bios are quite clever.  Sounds like a great way to plan one’s epitaph.

As usual my head is abuzz with the social media explosion and the impact technology has on my world. While communication has always been a part of the technology, folks that barely own computers are becoming familiar with Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, and twitter.  iPhones are being advertised so deliciously on television ads that my lust can barely be contained, not to mention the tiniest of notebook computers making an appearance with the cutest of jingles. Sometimes I am not sure If what I am doing makes sense for my business. Sometimes I worry that I waste my time with my focus on all this geeky technology and social media web 2.0 stuff.

I am no expert, but as usual I know enough to be dangerous, and to provide a lively conduit to my less technologically focused comrades. A less kind way of saying that is that I am obsessed with technology and communication but that I have people in my life who keep me from completely disappearing into the matrix. I love social connections technology provides, and I have for as long as I can remember. I went from devouring Asimov and Heinlein as a child and dreaming about connections within world to almost going broke networking coffeehouses with chat and email and online information in St. Louis prior to the web explosion.

One of the reasons I ventured out on my own in recruiting is that I could experiment with stuff like this and the stuff that is still being developed. I have had a lot of success with the social media in recruiting, and love the heck out of it. There is truly a dizzying amount of activity, and it promises to be a wild ride as we venture even more into interactivity and robust network applications. It can be a distraction, but I have found that as long as my online activities drive me back to the telephone (or my bottom line) I am okay. It is hard to focus and be that disciplined with all the fun, crazy stuff happening out there, but recruiting success (like most of life) really is about discipline and focus. I know I have to stay balanced, and a tool like twitter is very dangerous for us folks easily distracted by shiny bits, but it is also a way to find people, and that is what I do for a living. I guess it is always all about the results, and I should just let those decide if my geeky methods are helpful or harmful.

I believe that life is always enhanced by connection, which is partly why I love being a recruiter. And though I know that a lot of folks scoff at meaningful connections through a computer or a mobile device, for me it goes without saying that the lines between the virtual world and that of my own back yard are now so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable. I have had countless virtual world interactions that changed my life, made me money, or led me to find new friends or business contacts, so there is no debate on the value to me. The challenge for me lies in finding a balance. The dizzying real time feeds of email, tweets, chat and mobile blogging are as necessary to me as my morning cup of joe, but I have to work to find a way to stay grounded, centered and balanced in my approach, otherwise I might go crazy. So I am working on it. I think it is funny that I try to do 20 minutes of sitting meditation each morning, and then I go off to work, but it does seem to help me keep my balance.

Recruiting efficiently has a lot to do with doing effective research. That is why I think my methods might be interesting to people that are not just recruiters. Here is an example of how I use twitter. Think of it as a constant explosion of 140 character thoughts into space. Steams of consciousness from an unidentified number of consciousnesses. Random thoughts, pointers to pictures and articles and interviews and what someone had for dinner. Dizzying, right? You can follow people and see, in real-time, their streams on your screen. Entertaining, fun, pretty pointless though, right? Wrong.

Enter tweet scan, a real-time twitter search. For example, I will search for St. Louis tweets, and what do we find? An ever growing and surprisingly active list of folks using twitter here in my home town. Coolio! I am seeing denizens of the web that I never realized were there. But wait, what is that? Oh, a tweet from someone I might know, who knew that guy was on twitter. Man I need to get back in touch with that guy, uh, wait, holy cow. He is tweeting that he is hiring people, and is having problems. He needs me!

Uh, sorry guys, I gotta run. Right there is some potential business popping its head up and, as a rhino, I need to charge right after it. But isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly pointless tool can help you do what you need to do?  Or at least it can if you know how to use it.

Wouldn’t it be horrible if our American suburbs starting turning into slums?

It’s already happening, according to this article from The Atlantic:  “The Next Slum?”

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay . . .

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

This article documents that many of yesterday’s suburban Pleasantvilles that are already tipping into decay.  The elephant in the room is the inexorable increase in energy prices.  Cheap oil created the suburbs.  Expensive energy will destroy their affordability.  

Why am I convinced that the rise in energy prices is inexorable?  Because even though we are starting to have a national dialogue that “something” needs to be done about energy supplies, very few Americans are taking this crisis seriously.  We continue carving out new suburbs, encouraged by pipe dreams about corn being solution to the energy problem.  Yet we are doing almost nothing to develop sustainable ways to replacing the 5,000 gallons of oil Americans use each second.   We are in deep denial while conservation is still ridiculed by many Americans (e.g., those who vote with SUV’s and new suburban and exurban houses).

The coming years are not going to be kind to many of those Americans who bought into unsustainable versions of the American Dream.

Not all hookers are like “Kristen,” the gorgeous, high-living prostitute allegedly employed by Eliot Spitzer.  Not all prostitutes work for wealthy and powerful executives or politicians.   Not all prostitution is provided under the supervision of a sophisticated club like the Emperor VIP club.  

A friend of mine, Geri Dreiling, wrote a detailed article about the other kind of prostitute, the kind that will trade sex for “a sandwich from a nearby convenience store, even a bucket of chicken from KFC.”  Geri’s award-winning article was published by a St. Louis alternative newspaper, The Riverfront Times, in 2002.

Here are a few excerpts:

Like most prostitutes working the streets of St. Louis, Tammy Sue Curtner is a drug addict.

A 33-year-old mother with wavy brown hair and pale skin, Tammy traded her body for drugs, a blowjob for twenty bucks. She’d turn tricks in an alley, in a stranger’s car, on a dirty communal mattress in a vacant building littered with broken bottles and used needles.

Her johns were downtown businessmen on the way to work in the morning, construction workers on lunch breaks, married men bored with their subdivision lives.

“I’ve met all types of guys, straight down to the weirdest and the nastiest,” she says. “Lawyers, doctors, straight down to bums.”

. . . The four-hundred-plus women [Judge Jim Sullivan] sees are, on average, over the age of 31 and sexually abused drug addicts; some are mentally ill, dropouts with an eleventh-grade education and the mothers of two children. Some have HIV, and at least one study suggests that close to 30 percent of the women have hepatitis C, another deadly disease.

And no one resembles Julia Roberts.

Many are overweight, filthy from living on the streets, sick and desperate. They don’t wear seductive garb; instead, these women sport dirty T-shirts and shorts or discarded clothing thrown away in alley Dumpsters.

On Feb. 28, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. submitted House Congressional Resolution 305 for consideration to the House of Representatives: “Recognizing the importance of bicycling in transportation and recreation.” I assume that this resolution is a perfectly valid reaction to this boneheaded statement by one of Bush’s appointees.

I don’t think Blumenauer’s resolution has any chance of passing, because it suggests that some money now going for highways should actually be used to encourage people to use bicycles for their transportation needs.   God forbid that we actually encourage such a perfectly sensible mode of transportation.  You know the arguments, prevents obesity, uses no fossil fuel, cheap, is perfect for urban commutes.  I’ve previously posted on some of the many reasons to use a bicycle for commuting.  There are, indeed, many reasons for doing so, especially in an urban area where many commutes are fewer than five miles.  BTW, what would a bicycle-friendly city look like?  Here’s one version.

I learned of Bluemenauer’s resolution by reading Andrew Leonard’s article in Salon.com, “Life and death and bicycling.”  Just because you use a bicycle doesn’t mean you are “green.”  Leonard includes a Sierra Club test to see how “green” you are.  I am a rather cool 92 out of 100, a very green cyclist! 

I do want to publicly thank Representative Blumenauer for bringing some much-needed attention to bicycles as a serious mode of transportation.   His resolution is chock full of statistics that should (but likely won’t) wake up those who don’t yet take bicycling seriously.   I’m pasting in, below, the full text of Bluemauer’s resolution on the importance of bicycling (here’s another place to read the full resolution):

Mr. BLUMENAUER (for himself and Mr. OBERSTAR) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

Whereas a national transportation system conducive to bicycling produces enriched health, reduced traffic congestion and air pollution, economic vitality, and an overall improved quality of living is valuable for the Nation;

Whereas by dramatically increasing levels of bicycling in United States cities tangible and intangible benefits to the quality of life for cities and towns across the country will be realized;

Whereas we now live in a Nation with 300 million people, and that number is expected to grow to 365 million by 2030 and to 420 million by 2050 with the vast majority of that growth occurring in urban areas with limited ability to accommodate increased motor vehicle travel;

Whereas since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has grown 3 times faster than the United States population, and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations;

Whereas one-third of the current population does not drive due to age, disability, ineligibility, economic circumstances, or personal choice;

Whereas the United States is challenged by an obesity epidemic, 65 percent of United States adults are either overweight or obese, and 13 percent of children and adolescents are overweight, due in large part to a lack of regular activity;

Whereas the Center for Disease Control estimates that if all physically inactive Americans became active, we would save $77 billion in annual medical costs;

Whereas over 753 of our Nation’s Mayors have signed onto the climate protection agreement of the United States Conference of Mayors urging the Federal Government to enact policies and programs to meet or exceed a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of a 7 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012;

Whereas the transportation sector contributes one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and passenger automobiles and light trucks alone contribute 21 percent;

Whereas bicycle commuters annually save on average $1,825 in auto-related costs, reduce their carbon emissions by 128 pounds, conserve 145 gallons of gasoline, and avoid 50 hours of gridlock traffic; (more…)

This is an interesting concern. I’ve been following the issue from sources like this and this. It turns out the Microsoft is planning to finally pay full regard to the standards board that was in place before Microsoft joined the web.

Internet Explorer has been a very forgiving browsing environment, and therefore has been enabling shoddy design practice for a dozen years. Now the chickens may be coming home to roost as IE 8 (might) follow established standards and require correctly coded pages that will look and behave the same in all browsers.

The problem they have is to decide whether they can afford to initially alienate all those Microsoft-only website developers by implementing the international standard with their next release. It is the socially responsible thing to do, but there will be whining. Badly coded web pages will look as bad in IE8 as they already do in all the other browsers.

I have no sympathy. I can’t help it, but powerful people who behave this way strike me as the essence of…

Spitzer wired the call girl service the money. Granted, he set up a relatively elaborate blind to hide the transaction (it was his own money, not the state’s), primarily from his wife, but the fact is he established the monitoring protocols in the banking system in New York to catch exactly this kind of covert transfer. In other words, he made sure the system could catch him.

The first question that came to my mind was: why didn’t he use cash?

The second question—

Well, the second question is such a cliche it almost doesn’t bear asking, but: what he hell was he thinking?

Not thinking. Acting. Reacting. Making an assumption. I’ve already heard the term “self destructive” applied, and it would indeed seem the case. He was instrumental in breaking up a prominent prostitution ring as a prosecutor, he’d gone on record about the destructiveness of prostitution to families and to society, he had made a Big Deal about ethics in all his campaigns.

For the record, while I certainly agree that prostitution can be destructive, I do not agree that it is necessarily so. Like other things, it depends on context, and in the context of a society that criminalizes it, thereby making sex workers vulnerable to all sorts of criminal control elements, yes it is very destructive. But not in and of itself as an idea. There have been times and places where it was not so, and even in this country (Nevada) we can see instances where it is the avenue to financial independence for women and men (yes, men—we forget in the salaciousness of scandal that there are male prostitutes, both straight and gay, that women from time to time have been known to pay for sex they can’t get “at home”). Like any other industry, there are levels, and like any otehr industry in history where social controls did not exist, there are abuses. Keeping it illegal means normative protections and access to all the safeguards that, say, construction workers take for granted do not and cannot apply.

However. In Spitzer’s case he created his own disaster by loudly proclaiming his support for keeping prostitution illegal and then acting on that stance. Add to that the banking practices for which he was also responsible, and I find I have no sympathy for him. He acted foolishly.

Clinton did not run on an extreme family values platform. It was there, he gave it lip service, but it was never a centerpiece of any of his campaigns. One may question his judgment in the case of Monica, but the lying to Congress was far worse than his little breech of conduct in an anteroom of the Oval Office.

People at that level should know better. To be crude, they have staff who can handle that sort of thing. (Let’s be honest—even CEOs, presidents of corporations, and so forth hire “handlers” who do everything from scheduling high powered meetings to getting the cleaning done. Arranging trysts—and making sure they stay off the radar– would simply be one of their functions, and a governor, much less a president, should have two or three people like this.)

As to why he did it…do we really need to ask that? Come on. Sex and its convolutions is one of those areas wherein we turn a blind eye as if a part of our brain had been excised and we can’t bear to think about it.

What follows is a teensy-bit R rated. Nothing graphic, but the ideas might shock.

You’re married. You have 90% of a good relationship with your spouse. But you like this one thing in bed, really like it, the way wine connosieurs like a rare Bordeaux—and for whatever reason your spouse just won’t do it. The question is, do you just shut that desire off and go to your grave never having it? Or do you step outside to have your Bordeaux?

We all have choices, sure, but the nature of that one seems draconian. You might say to the connosieur “You’ve become an alcoholic, you may not drink at all,” and that would be valid. But to say “I don’t like Bordeaux, at least not that vintage, so you can’t have it either as long as you’re with me…” That’s not the same.

How one chooses to handle this problem is also another matter. I’m all for open discussion. Sneaking around behind your spouse’s back is a major Do Not Do for me. But one ought to be able to talk about this. (Personally, I have always been of the opinion that the Clinton’s have an arrangement like this, going all the way back to Bill’s days as governor of Arkansas. I think what incensed Hilary was that Bill picked that partner under those conditions, and then lied about it. After all, he had handlers…)

But my lack of sympathy for Spitzer has nothing to do with the sex. It is the two-faced way he has conducted his public policy life. Obviously, he thought the rules he advocated for everyone else ought not to apply to him.

Or, more perversely and I think not at all uncommon, he wanted to rid the landscape of any and all opportunity in order to keep temptation away from himself—that he knew on some level that he couldn’t say no, so the only way to protect his integrity would be to banish the object of his desire.

But that meant banishing it for everyone else as well. So to serve the interests of his own inability to manage an appetite, everyone had to pay the price.

Just as they kind of are now.

He rendered himself ineffective as a governor in this. Because of the illegal nature of prostitution, because of that he opened himself up to blackmail. The only way out of that trap would be to declare that he didn’t care and that he believed prostitution ought not be a crime in any event.

But he’d already closed that avenue of argument.

No sympathy at all.

Idiot.

In an earlier post, I argued that people need to better appreciate that dollars are fungible (see here  and here).  Why is it important to understand that dollars are fungible?  A case in point is the new American enthusiasm for turning food into fuel. Consider this report from Fortune Magazine:

The growing myth that corn is a cure-all for our energy woes is leading us toward a potentially dangerous global fight for food. While crop-based ethanol -the latest craze in alternative energy - promises a guilt-free way to keep our gas tanks full, the reality is that overuse of our agricultural resources could have consequences even more drastic than, say, being deprived of our SUVs. It could leave much of the world hungry.

We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.
 
This year cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption. The problem is simple: It takes a whole lot of agricultural produce to create a modest amount of automotive fuel.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.

And consider this additional bad news from Earth Policy Institute: 

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.

As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.

Here’s are a few rhetorical questions to consider:  Can Americans justify filling up any more of those big SUV fuel tanks now that there is solid evidence that doing so will cause families on the other side of the world to suffer and die?  Can we justify cranking up the heat in the winter to stay toasty warm?  Should we merrily take long trips without considering the effects of burning this extra fuel on food prices (and thus food availability) to those people who are living on the margin?  Can we justify building more houses in the exburbs? 

We are now witnessing a collision between A) our desire to have fun and feel prestige through the discretionary buring of fuel, versus B) our ability to honestly look in the mirror to see ourselves as kind, decent and caring people.

Here’s a clever video that challenges the commonly mentioned creationist claim (based on William Paley’s arguments) that evolution is impossible for the same reasons that it is impossible for the parts of a clock to assemble themselves into a functioning clock.

Here’s the main point made by this video: When discussing evolution, make sure you are comparing apples to apples (clocks are not living organisms). And beware straw man arguments.

Read about it at The Onion.

It seems to me that Darwinism is to this election cycle as Family Values and Abortion have been to previous ones. There has been a recent rash of books and now a movie all pointing out how a conspiracy of elites are following the Darwin manifesto to create a facist atheist state.

Am I overstating it? Read this criticism (including their own release blurb) of Ben Stein’s new movie, “Expelled”. This movie about how bully tactics are what keeps the theory of evolution uncontested is scheduled for a mid-April release. But is already playing to mega-churches and closed-door sessions of school boards and state legislatures. Mainstream press has not yet officially had access to it.

Legislatures? According to NowPress.com in this short article:

The invitation to “Expelled” is just for legislators and their spouses, along with legislative aides. The press and public is excluded.

House Minority Leader Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, asked House general counsel Jeremiah Hawkes if that’s legal — since Florida law requires open meetings whenever two or more lawmakers meet to discuss pending business. Hawkes replied that, as long as they just watch the film and don’t discuss the issue or arrange any future votes, it’s technically legal.

Why? Because Florida just modified its education policy to require the Evolution to be mentioned in biology classes as a Scientific Theory. Two representatives have now introduced bills that would allow teachers to present discussion of “Intelligent Design” in science classes. The Florida Family Policy Council (one of the many branches of Focus on the Family) is the group sponsoring the showing.

(more…)

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

National Geographic has just published a terrific article summarizing the many ways in which animals think.   Here’s the article.  You can watch a short accompanying video on this topic of animal cognition here.

I like the approach to both the article and the video.  They are both centered around large beautiful portraits of many of the animals discussed, including Azy the orangutan, now-deceased Alex, the (famous) gray parrot, Kanzi, the (also famous) bonobo, Betsy the border collie, JB the giant Pacific octopus (an invertebrate that exhibits play behavior), tool-using New Caledonian crows, and an unnamed cichlid (a type of fish that is surprisingly savvy about social rank).  Even earthworms make a cameo appearance, based upon their ability to carefully select the right kind of leafy matter to block their tunnels.

I found the information to be clearly presented and startling, even though I was already familiar with many of these animal accomplishments.  Seeing these demonstrations of animal intelligence gathered in one article, accompanied by these wonderful portraits, brings home Darwin’s conclusion that the diversification of species has common roots; that there is, indeed, a biological unity of all life. 

The take-away message from the National Geographic article: “A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.”

I can’t say enough good things about National Geographic.  In a perfect world, every household would have a subscription to National Geographic.

In some of my previous posts both here on Dangerous Intersection and on Daylight Atheism, I’ve done my best to call attention to the corrupt, degraded state of most of today’s major news-gathering organizations. But a story I read today is truly the most astonishing example yet - both in the way the mainstream media has totally abandoned basic principles of journalistic ethics and integrity, and in the way they brazenly flaunt that behavior.

Last weekend, U.S. presidential candidate John McCain invited reporters to his vacation home in Arizona for a barbecue. McCain’s aides and staffers explained that the weekend was intended as a “social event” - i.e., no questions about McCain’s campaign strategy, voting record, or political positions - and was therefore off the record. When some reporters objected, McCain’s staff agreed that the weekend would be on the record after all, but only on the condition that reporters brought no audio or video recording equipment. The reporters meekly acceded to this, and that was the extent of our brave press corps’ journalistic heroism.

As I said, since the weekend was a “social event”, no questions were asked that would tell the American public anything of substance about McCain the candidate. Instead, the press corps was wined, dined and schmoozed by McCain’s campaign all weekend. Evidently, none of them saw anything improper either in accepting these gifts or in telling us all about it. I’ll let our brave, intrepid reporters describe their weekend retreat with Mr. Straight Talk in their own words.

Holly Bailey of Newsweek has the scoop on the accommodations:

The campaign booked the senator’s aides and reporters into one of the only big hotels in town: the Enchantment Resort, a five-star hotel nestled so far back in the picturesque red rock canyons of Sedona that most in the group found that their cell phones were out of range. To cope with the stress of being incommunicado, people booked massages at the hotel spa and went on hikes, including one on which an instructor sought to help participants unblock their “inner chi.” “Let me tell you, I’ve got a lot of chi today,” joked Steve Duprey, a close friend of McCain’s from New Hampshire who has been traveling with the campaign. Others played golf, went swimming or simply explored the hotel compound.

Michael D. Shear of the Washington Post tells us more about the five-star hotel he and his colleagues enjoyed:

The idea, McCain said, was to allow reporters to get to know him and his staff under less stressful circumstances. (The fact that the press spent the weekend at a resort called Enchantment where many sipped wine and enjoyed lengthy deep-tissue massages probably contributed to that feeling.)

Several reporters from CNN blew the lid off of McCain’s barbecued ribs recipe:

McCain revealed that barbecuing for guests is one of the few ways he relaxes, especially during the grueling campaign, and was eager to share his carefully honed recipe on the gas grill: baby back ribs (bought at Costco), cooked bones down with a dry rub that’s a third garlic powder, a third salt and a third pepper.

The trick to not letting it dry out? Keep putting lemon juice on, the senator said.

…Dinner was served on tables by Oak Creek, which runs through the property. The menu included ribs, grilled chicken, hot dogs, bratwurst, hamburgers, beef tamales, couscous and pasta salad.

CBS News’ Dante Higgins offers these penetrating bits of journalistic insight about McCain’s wardrobe and interior decorator:

McCain wore a white sweatshirt with a silk-screened family photo on it, sunglasses, a green baseball cap and blue jeans. As grillmaster, he looked like the all-American dad, with a story for every spot in the house.

…The décor of McCain’s house had a southwest flavor. Navajo rugs don the walls and floors. Well worn couches and chairs furnish the lower level of his home, which has exposed brick, wooden