I’ll admit that I’ve become obsessed with clouds lately.

We’ve had an incredibly intense season of thunderstorms in the Midwest. An hour of sunshine has become simply a chance for nature to take a breather before erupting with yet another thunderstorm.

Then again, take a look at the detailed things you can find among the clouds. Not just shapes, but all kinds of animals and people and ghosts. I can’t deny it, because I saw them.

We are living in a giant kaleidoscope, it seems. I know that I’ve already foisted cloud photos on you. Perhaps you’ve had enough of “my” clouds. I was ready to move on too, but then I found these new cloud menageries outside my window as the small jet in which I was flying traveled around a massive storm rather than through it. We were returning from Minneapolis after an intense weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform. After a weekend of intellectual endeavors, it was time for a spiritual experience. This is a different kind of memorable experience than I had on the trip to Minneapolis.

A fellow passenger and I were stunned by what we saw outside of the plane. We were 30,000 feet in the air and I started taking these photos through my tiny scratched airplane window.

As I looked, mesmerized, I started seeing all kinds of animals in the clouds, including my deceased dog “Puccini” in the scene below (or is that your deceased dog?). You can click on any of these photos to bring out the details. I can assure you that this will be worth your while, unless you are the unusual kind of person who already takes the time to stare at the clouds. Even if you do like clouds, these were special clouds, even for those of you who like to look at clouds while flying. These photos are not PhotoShopped; this is exactly how these scenes looked to my eyes during my flight.

There were dozens of animals to be seen, and people too. For the modest ticket price of a few hundred dollars, the plane was functioning as a time machine, transporting us back to our childhoods, to a time when we were allowed to look for things in the clouds for long periods, without being made self-conscious that we were “wasting” time.

Amazing as it is, trillions of tiny water molecules, each one the same as each other, can assume dramatic macroscopic shapes when gently stirred by heat and wind. How is it that large intricate patterns emerge? Why not just a big smear of misty air across the window? Order for free, Stuart Kauffman might say. Kauffman might remind us that we were witnessing a rather simple application of the subject matter of complexity. He would point out that it is actually common for billions of identical parts to self-organize, almost magically, into shapes and functions that are intensely surprising and compelling.

Finding a collection of ghosts living in the sky, or any other unpredictable scene, is thus quite predictable.

These particular ghosts seemed to be calling out to the passengers on the plane. Maybe they were trying to say that we needed to take the time to slow down our lives enough to appreciate the complex adaptive systems that humans are too. You see, humans are also self-assembled bits of common materials, just like these cloud people. The human miracle is in the exquisite manner in which trillions of relatively simple molecules are assembled. But who could have predicted that lots of water and some phosphorus, calcium, iron could turn into beings like us?

Carl Sagan wrote that we are made of “star stuff.” True enough, and this is a thought that is deep enough and powerful enough that that this single thought should be enough to compel us to stop long enough and ponder deeply enough to stop killing each other and to start honoring each others’ existence and sentience. But somehow, Sagan’s realization isn’t enough for to bring us peace.

We’re not only stardust, we are also water beings (we’re mostly water), so we have a lot more in common with these cloud creatures than we might realize. This is my anti-war idea, then: all of us need to look at the clouds more often.

As the plane finished moving around the storm, we spotted this vast fluffy flat landscape leading up to distant “mountain range,” all of it made entirely of tiny water drops 30,000 feet in the air.

That was it for cloud photography. Time to move on to other things, right? Not so fast . . . (more…)

There was no mistake, no inadvertence, no miscue, no stumbling about it. Bush and his cronies lied. And thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because of those lies. It is truly shameful and incredible that George W. Bush still occupies the White House and is still threatening to kill more soldiers based on more lies (regarding Iran), but there he still sits.

What do we call someone who intentionally causes one death? A murderer.

Here’s Arianna Huffington’s summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 200-page “Phase II” report on how the Bush administration used — and abused — pre-war intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq:

A statement released by committee chairman Jay Rockefeller makes it clear that the administration “on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq…in making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

The report doesn’t use the word, but we all know what it’s called when someone presents something as fact that’s directly contradicted by the evidence. A lie. Not a mistake. A lie.

The conclusions of the Report are not surprising, but we have an extremely low bar for Congress these days, so it was with relief that we can now see these clear and direct conclusions in writing by a Senate sub-committee.

Here are some of the conclusions of committee chairman Jay Rockefeller’s statement regarding the Report (with Huffington’s emphasis):

As the mercury rose past 90 on this sunny Sunday, I biked over to see the Pagan Picnic in Tower Grove Park. I attend this event regularly, and it gets a bit bigger each year. There are many booths selling fair foods and drinks, and psychic readings, acupuncture, massage, crystals galore, and anything else out on the loose edge of New Age (”Ancient Wisdom”) Credulity.

It’s fun.

What I like most about the event is its disorganized ability to weird the normals. Does a top hat go with a black leather skirt and army boots? That guy seems to make it work. One post-apocalyptic sort with a blond Mohawk is videotaping the Creative Anachronisms/ Dungeons and Dragons/ Swords and Sorcery crowd beating each other about the limbs with padded swords and staffs. And the damsels. I admit that it is fun to see what young women wear to scandalize their elders. In the flesh, as it were. Well, one man with bones through his earlobes only had on “primitive” jewelry and a loincloth. But his tan seemed up to the job.

Yes, that woman is sitting under the tree spinning her own thread from wool she probably carded herself. Does Dr. Pepper go with a pterodactyl leg? Why not? Well, turkey, actually. But the hawker is convincing. Do glacier spalled obsidian needles make good wind chimes? Ya bet! I bought. And there are many drums. Several booths provide different sorts of handmade drums with wood or skin tops.

Various musical and dance troupes perform in the Bardic Circle, one of the pavilions in the park. Somewhere there is a schedule posted. But this crowd is anarchistic. No one seems to be in charge, but it works.

What is the entry fee? Well, free. But donations to a local food bank are suggested, and bins for collecting cans of food are provided.

Charity, like honor, mercy, and tolerance, are basic pagan family values.

The Bush Administration will do anything rather than admit its own faults. The U.S. is awash in wasteful cars, SUV, suburban sprawl and energy wasteful architecture. It would seen that the oil crisis is substantially the fault of the United States. That’s not the message the U.S. recently delivered to the “world,” however:

Samuel Bodman [the U.S. Energy Secretary], attending two days of meetings in northern Japan among energy chiefs from Group of Eight industrialized countries and other top economies, said the surge in world oil prices was largely a simple problem of supply and demand.

“We’re in a difficult position where we have a lid on production and we have increasing demand in the world,” he told a small group of reporters, dismissing the effects of speculation and unclear inventory levels and other factors on oil prices.

“I would devoutly hope we … see a reduction of the use of oil in the world on the one hand, and an increase in the supply so we can see some mitigation in the pressure on price,” Bodman said.

Truly, the U.S. is part of the “world.” How about an admission to the “world” that the United States has done almost NOTHING to curtail energy use since 1974.

Tonight, I had the privilege to attend a private screening of Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” The film was shown to several hundred people attending the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In his introduction to the film, Donahue indicated that “We have the most sanitized war in our history.” His point was that the American people cannot deal appropriately about this war if they can’t see the images related to the war. He implored, “Show the people the sacrifices the men and women of this country are making.” The American people cannot feel the pain caused by this war, because the full story of the war is not available to them, thanks to the continuing media blackout of all inconvenient images and stories. Instead of learning about what’s really happening in Iraq, the American people keep getting distracted with things like entertainment parading as news or tax cuts.

Donahue stated that the US involvement in Iraq has caused more than 20,000 “grievous injuries,” a fact which he finds “beyond horrible.”

What are the kinds of images that the American people are denied? Everyone knows about the government’s attempt to keep Americans from seeing pictures of coffins of soldiers returning from Iraq. There are equally dramatic pictures available, however. One of those was briefly shown in the film, and it was run only in the Rocky Mountain News. It is a photo of a woman who wanted to sleep next to the coffin of her husband (James Cathey, an Iraq soldier) while military guards stood by. This was to be her last night with him. She slept on a little mattress almost underneath the coffin.

Donahue’s point is straightforward. “Show us the war. We are adults. We can then decide if you want to end this damn war now.”

Donahue learned of the subject of the movie, Thomas Young, while visiting with Ralph Nader. It was Nader who tipped off Donnie that there was a young man, recently returned from Iraq, who might serve as a good subject for the kind of film Donahue was interested in making. Donahue traveled to the military hospital where he met Thomas, though Thomas did not meet Donahue until later because he was then in a coma. When Donahue finally met a conscious Thomas Young (in Kansas City), he noticed antiwar bumper stickers on the family kitchen table. Until then, Donahue had no idea that the subject of his film, Thomas Young, had antiwar feelings. After he saw those bumper stickers, Donahue thought to himself, “Maybe we really have something here.”

It was at the same time that Donahue learned about Thomas Young that he also happened to meet Eddie Vedder of the band Pearl Jam (also through Ralph Nader). Vedder offered to compose music for the film, which he did in five days, free of charge.

I don’t want to ruin the film by discussing too many of the specifics, but I will reveal that it is an emotional journey for the subject of the film as well as the audience. Only five days after traveling to Iraq, Thomas Young was shot in the shoulder, which caused him to become a paraplegic. Much of the movie uses the way Young deals with his injuries as a backdrop for the fact that so many members of Congress were obtuse to the human cost of this Iraqi invasion. The film is made ever more emotionally poignant due to the intense involvement in Thomas’s life by his new wife and his mother. The film also features a two intense moments with Thomas’s stepfather, a ditto head.

Thomas Young turns out to be a hero both in the way he deals with his injuries and in the way he speaks out as an activist following his return home. All is not well for Thomas, however, and these challenges are a emotionally wrenching journey for filmgoers.

Another hero of the film is Senator Robert Byrd, who eloquently did everything in his power to turn back the tide of war-mongering in Congress. As it turns out, Byrd was one of only 23 senators who voted to deny George Bush powers to invade Iraq. The film cleverly intersperses the Congressional debate with the struggles of Thomas Young.

The superb editing of this film is apparent throughout. Donahue commented that he wanted to be very careful to not make the film “preachy,” and he succeeded in this.

“Body of War” is being released soon, though there is no distributor for the film. It will not be a financial success. Nonetheless, it has played to rave reviews. In fact, one of the members of Congress who voted “yes” to the Iraq invasion, privately viewed the film and told Donahue “This film should be shown in every college and every university in the country.”

At the conclusion of the showing at the NCMR2008, it received an extended standing ovation.

Donahue admits that there is no mass market for a film of this type, a fact that is utterly depressing given the need for films like this. As Donahue commented, “If you’re not going to use free speech, stop spilling their blood.”Luckily, the film does have an financial afterlife. It will apparently be picked up by Netflix, and there will be other availability in scattered markets. You’ll need to look closely to see if it’s playing in your town. You could even make some phone calls to try to get the independent theaters in your area to play this film.

Donahue explained that in the big media, “you are rewarded solely by the size of the crowd you can draw.” Therefore, we’ll never hear about stories like that of Thomas Young in the big media. In order to get this story out, we’ll need to build media from the grassroots up.

When the country is beating the drums for war, all movement is seen as progress, and anybody getting in the way of the military action is branded a coward. This is not a new theory. It was made plain many decades ago in a speech by Herman Goring. It is also a point made by another new movie, “War Made Easy,” which will be screened at this same media reform convention tomorrow night. The conclusion of that film is that if the President wants to go to war in this country, it will happen. That’s the nature of our politics, our media and our citizenry. It’s a very sad story, indeed.

After the film and Q&A, Donahue graciously stayed around to meet some of the people who attended the screening and to chat with them.

I shook Donahue’s hand and told him that I write for a blog that draws 4,000 visitors every day. I told him that when I sat down to watch his movie, I doubted that I would learn anything new because I’ve long been a serious student of the Iraq conflict and the political backdrop. I admitted to Donahue that was wrong, however, because this film got “under my radar and it was emotionally stunning.” Donahue looked at my badge and said “Dangerous Intersection . . . it would be good if you could talk about the film on your blog.” I told him that “That’s why I’m here.”

As many people know, Phil Donahue was host to a highly-ranked show on MSNBC in October 2002. In fact, it was a leading show on MSNBC. (more…)

Last night, I was flying from St. Louis to Minneapolis to participate in the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform.  I was flying in a small jet (the kind that holds about 60 passengers).

As we approached the Minneapolis airport, we started going through storm clouds.  Undeterred, the pilot started bringing the plane down for a landing.  The runway was in sight.  That’s when some huge storm clouds became apparent.  Not only that, lightning surrounded the airplane-it looked like the lightning was only a couple yards outside the window.  It was right after noticing the lightning that the plane went into a sustained stall.  It was not the kind of controlled stall that planes enter just prior to touching down.  Rather, this was the kind of stall where the nose of the plane goes way up (maybe 50° from horizontal) and the plane starts losing altitude, sliding backwards.

To make things worse, the plane started blowing sideways in the vicious wind.  This condition lasted for about 10 seconds. The feeling of being blown around like a leaf was really disconcerting.  No one on the plane reacted other than being extremely quiet. Nonetheless, I really truly thought that this was going to be the end for me.

Luckily (you knew the story would end well, since I’m writing this post), the pilot regained control of the plane, leveling out and fighting his way through five minutes of wicked winds.  There were lots of bumps and jolts, and many of the passengers were doublechecking and triple checking their seatbelts.

During the excitement, I could’ve sworn that I heard a cat.  As it turned out, the man sitting in front of me had a big black suitcase under his seat that was actually a carrier for a cat.  During the severe turbulence, the cat not only made lots of noise, it apparently shat all over itself, causing a thick stench of cat poop to spread throughout the seating area. The other passengers (including me) had to endure that smell (which was so bad that it was nauseating) while the pilot made a 20-minute detour around the storm in order to try to land the plane a second time.

Worse yet, I am highly allergic to cats.  My exposure triggered asthma, for which I needed to use an inhaler last night.

There’s no real point to this post, other than my need to rant.  I had no idea that passengers could bring cats in the passenger compartment of airplanes.  This especially surprises me, given the fact that numerous people (I’ve heard that it’s 10% of the population) are allergic to cats.

After the plane was safely on the ground (the passengers applauded when the plane safely touched down), I asked the flight attendant whether it was appropriate to have a cat in the passenger compartment of an airplane.  She stated that it is done all the time, and that the passenger needs only to pay an extra $100 in order to bring a pet in the passenger compartment of the plane.

I would suggest one modification to the $100 rule.  The next time a cat shits during a flight, the passenger bringing the cat should pay $100 to each passenger within 10 feet of the cat.

I was reading my daily dose of blood pressure spike (creationism news) when I found this tidbit on TheConservativeVoice.com:

It is my strongly held belief as a conservative, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-family, pro-creationism vs Darwinian Evolution believer that there is no way in God^‘s green earth that that old white guy, who would make history as the oldest first term President if he proves me wrong, can beat the young, inexperienced, eloquent and charismatic black man named Barrack Obama if his life depended on it, and it may because 72 year olds drop dead everyday of much less rigorous stress than running for President.

I’ve said before on this forum that it seemed that the Republicans felt that they had a chance against Hillary, but feared to run against Obama.

He continues:

African Americans who do not care about his socialist, anti-baby, pro-Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender agenda will come out with great hope and pride for the first African American who has aspired to become the most powerful man in the world. And, if not for my social and religious convictions, I would not blame them one bit for voting for one of their own. America could withstand eight years of Bill Clinton and we can withstand four of Barrack Obama.

Personally, I think we could withstand a term or two of return to fiscal responsibility, getting the government back out of the bedroom, and removing White House obstruction to sciences.

Can We? Yes we can!

Delightful editing of the candidates’ videos along with Stewartesque commentary:

When we think of skies, we often think of blue sky with white clouds. As adults we often forget to appreciate the natural beauty available to us simply by looking up.

There are many other types of skies, of course. For the past ten days, we’ve had lots of turbulent weather here in the Midwest (St. Louis). We’ve seen thunderstorms almost every day. We’ve also see lots of sun, and we’ve seen many of combinations of bright sun while new storms were brewing. It makes for some spectacular skies. I couldn’t help noticing and photographing the dramatic cloud formations.

The photo above is actually a stitching together of three photos, looking to the north from a midtown St. Louis overpass. If you click on it you’ll get a much better view (you are invited to click on any of these, to enlarge them).

The above photo was taken by Charlotte, my seven year old daughter, who exclaimed that the huge clouds dwarfed the airplane.

Charlotte took this one too:

She snapped the photo out of the car window, which you can see from the blurred telephone pole.

I took the photo below outside my office window today. The formations changed so dramatically and so often that I found myself glancing out the window repeatedly. It made me feel like a kid that I was taking the time to notice the vista. It’s like living in a lava lamp.

If it weren’t that we so often have the chance to see spectacular skies, we’d stop taking them for granted. If they occurred only once each year, we’d probably gather outside to stare at the skies on that special night–we’d probably even create a holiday for that day where all of us would show up with our cameras. We’d sing special cloud songs and eat special cloud-watching food.

Truly, the colors, the formations and the movement make Fourth of July fireworks look amateurish.

Maybe we should even cancel the fireworks this Fourth of July to remind each other that we can also be peaceful people. We really could start to celebrate our peaceful moments as well as our war-like history. And we can do it with naturally-occurring glorious backgrounds many days each year.

Barack Obama has, for all intents and purposes, clinched the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Hillary will jocky for position in before the upcoming convention. Much speculation has been thrown about as to whether or not she’ll be a vice presidential nominee. I am dubious of that. Dubious that Obama will risk bringing her perceived “baggage” on board, dubious that she would accept. I think it would be a hell of a slate, though, one that has only a single precedent (yes, there is a precedent) but with the roles reversed.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull—a feminist, a suffragist, a newspaper publisher, a Wall Street player, a spiritualist, and free lover—declared her candidacy for president of the United States. It was a serious bid, make no mistake, and one which virtually split the Women’s Suffrage movement in two. Those who ought to have been her natural allies—Susan B. Anthony chief among them—couldn’t stand her. They attempted to bar her from conventions, they denounced her in their own press, they threw obstructions in her path. Why? She was…immodest.

But the Women’s Suffrage movement was torn. They needed Woodhull because she understood how to work the system. She was popular, with men and women. She understood how money worked. She brought a lot with her, so they were forced to include her in their January 1872 convention as a principle speaker and as one of the “leaders” of the Equal Rights Movement. As Anthony told the convention “Now bless your soulds she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington from Wall Street with powerful argument and with lots of cash behind her, and I bet you cash is a big thing with Congress.”

Woodhull was one of six women who appeared before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 12. Their purpose was to push forward a Declaratory Act which would grant Woman Suffrage by vote of congress. They had twenty thousand signatures. That evening, suffragist and spiritualist Ada Ballou put Woodhull’s name forward as a candidate for president, leading the Equal Rights Party. In May, the Party was officially chartered and Woodhull named as its candidate at Apollo Hall in New York City.

It was a progressive party by any stretch of the imagination. Twenty-three planks formed the Party platform—covering education, suffrage, social and industrial reforms, several of which resonate down to the present: graduated direct taxation, regulation of monopolies, labor laws, and a merit-based civil service to replace cronyism.

Because the Suffrage Movement has always been joined at the hip to Abolition (among other movements), Victoria Woodhull chose Frederick Douglass to be her running mate.

However, it was a publicity choice, one unfortunately not backed by the candidate in question. Douglass did not accept. He was committed to U.S. Grant and the Republicans and had been present at none of the Equal Rights Party events. Woodhull chose to ignore this little problem and ran with Douglass the presumed vice presidential candidate.

By June the Party was deep in debt with donors bailing out. By September it was over.

The Declaratory Act to grant suffrage failed. Anthony and Stanton blamed Woodhull and her “precipitate” bid for the presidency. Not to mention that Woodhull’s “free love” and spiritualist philosophies were unwelcome by the serious-minded and abstemious main line suffragists, who saw sex and booze as the twin shackles binding women to a second-class status (the Temperance Movement, founded the following year, joined suffrage and temperance and led ultimately not only to the 19th Amendment granting women the vote in 1921 but also to the 18th Amendment—Prohibition—which is the only amendment to the Constitution ever to be repealed).

Short-lived as it was, the Woodhull-Douglass ticket has become part of our national folklore, more for what it represented than for anything that it actually accomplished. But a closer look shows that the ideas fueling this ill-fated bid were as progressive as anything one might imagine today. It was, after all, the Equal Rights Party—and Victoria Woodhull was deadly earnest about that. She sought to unchain everyone from the bonds of the past—materially and spiritually.

I have noted in the last several months the word “Progressive” coming to the fore, replacing Liberal. McCain uses Liberal—expectedly, as a cudgel—but Obama, when he says anything like that at all, says Progressive. For a long time, the Right has held a rhetorical high ground and dominated the discourse by controlling the language. It has taken the Left all this time to realize that people react in often Pavlovian thoughtlessness to language and labels and to start using some of those strategies. Most people on the Left tend to believe people are not so simplistic, but time and again we are shown that our expectations of other peoples’ intellectual capactiy are in error. That and the fact that neuro-linguistics tells us this response is anything but simple.

Bush has damaged the country. Badly. To some extent, this is because he has blindly followed his Party line—something conservatives are supposed to be above. Mostly, this is due to his shortcomings as a leader. He doesn’t Get It.

And of course he was handed a raw deal with 9/11. Make no mistake, any president would have had problems dealing with that. We were unfortunate enough to have a mediocre intellect in the White House at the time, but the fall out from that was daunting.

McCain is not a Bush clone—not on any kind of one-to-one basis. But he is bound to a Party that has evolved into what it is under the influence of ideological positions which are untenable. To become the Republican Party of, say, Eisenhower, they must divest themselves of a cumbersome element of what they perceive as their power base. They cannot do this if they win.

In order for the Democrats to become a new kind of Party, one capable of dealing with the coming 90 years, they must have a focus. Progressivism may be it. Different from doctrinaire Liberalism, Progressivism is potentially a causal-based, reality-centered mind-set that could be flexible enough to utilize liberalism and conservatism as need be, something doctrinaire Liberalism could never do.

Obama has rhetorically held himself to be above the usual fray. The minefield of race was a proving ground for him. It is possible that he may be the locus for a resurgent progressivism which could free us from the left-overs of both the Cold War and the Fundamentalist crusades and catalyze the creation of a new American ethos.

But he’d better be damned careful who he picks as his running mate and how he manages his cabinet. Because that’s where the difference will be made.

Would Hillary Clinton be a good choice? She understands the nature of national politics in a way that maybe Obama, in his youth, does not. She could be a powerful resource—Obama’s version of LBJ. But she could also be a weight, binding him to 20th Century Politics As Usual.

Stay tuned.

This article at MSNBC explains the history of the term “nervous breakdown.” It’s rarely used now, except in pop culture.

The term — a vague catch-all phrase that could mean anything from a psychotic episode to having a bad day — is not a medical term, doctors say, but it was a popular one that was gentle, non-specific and therefore non-threatening, and could serve as a cover.

In previous decades, those with “nervous breakdowns” would simply disappear, because we had little understanding of what was causing the problem and few treatments for bringing the person “back.”

“The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years or so, in terms of our understanding of mental disorders,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, director of the American Psychiatric Association’s division of research. “When I was a kid, there were references to relatives or neighbors, who had a ‘nervous breakdown’ and had to go to a hospital, and dropped out for a period of time, and nobody would really be very specific about what the nature of the illness was.”

Treatments varied from the “rest cure,” isolation and preventing all stimulation in the 19th century (described by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1891 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”) to hydrotherapy, electric shock treatments, insulin treatment and lobotomy in the 20th century. Patients who were hospitalized often faced long-term commitments.

“People are no longer just disappearing from the community in the same way that they did when that term was coined and was in use,” Regier said. “The major emphasis now with the mentally ill is on recovery.”

Reading this article made me wonder whether we should bring back this non-specific term to enable over-stretched people to take a break from their routines, without the stigma of “mental illness,” in order to recharge.   This article also reminded me of a friend who recently went on a Catholic Jesuit retreat:  a 3-day stay at a 90-acre wooded compound where those attending bring no electronic devices and are discouraged from talking the entire time. The purpose is to meditate and pray intensely.   My friend said that he finds this to be a valuable experience (he attends once per year).

If you stop to listen to the “solution” to the energy crisis, you’ll hear millions of people (including most politicians) reassuring themselves that coal will be the new oil, because the United States has plenty of it and because there is now a way to burn coal “cleanly.” This last claim is pure fantasy. There is no feasible way of burning coal cleanly.

There is no place in the U.S. where coal is burned cleanly. Everywhere coal is burned, tons of CO2 are thrown into the atmosphere. The plans to set up clean coal plants have been scrapped, according the NYT.

For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground. . . But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

In short, “clean coal” is a fantasy.  A U.S. energy policy based on  the imminent availability of clean coal is a disaster.

Yet, simple as the idea [of clean coal] may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.

Burning coal for energy is dangerous for many reasons. The lack of any real life method of burning coal “cleanly” is one of many reasons to steer our energy policy sharply toward conservation.

Epilogue:

Jeffrey Sachs, writing in Time Magazine:

An important measure of the government’s technology commitment is the federal budget for energy research and development. According to the International Energy Agency, U.S. spending for all energy research–nuclear, wind, coal, solar, biofuels, etc.–was a meager $3.2 billion in 2006. The Pentagon spends that much in about 40 hours. Spending on carbon capture and sequestration was a mere $67 million.

Chimpanzees aren’t the only spectacularly intelligent animal species.  Sometimes human beings act intelligently!  Yes, humans are animals, as difficult as this is to believe for many people.

In this TED video, Joshua Klein reminds us about the intelligence of yet another species: crows.  Using their  intelligence, crows continue to flourish among human populations.

I just found out why we English speakers use apostrophe-ess ( ’s ) to indicate the Saxon Genitive Case. “Huh?” I can hear you gasp. I’ve been using it for 40 years to indicate the possessions of an object by a subject. It just always was this way, like mountains or the alt-tab keyboard convention. But never did it occur to me to wonder why we write it this particular way.

Until today. I was reading some essays by a mollusk biologist, and he threw this tidbit in as an aside (with the supporting evidence): Up until well into the 17th century, an Englishman would have to say (for example), “Yoda, his force is strong.” By the 18th century, they were saying, “Yoda’s force is strong.”

See?

We acknowledge the inherent sexism of the language whenever we say, “Sally’s cookies” rather than “Sally’r cookies”. But that’s beside the point: The point is “his”.

Several soldiers who have returned from combat zones talk with the American News Project about what they say is the widespread practice of using “drop weapons” to cover up the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You read that right! No reader of Dangerous Intersection, radical materialist or hard-bitten skeptic believes in science. To say otherwise is to give a false impression of what science actually is. Science is not something in which a person believes or does not believe. Science is not a belief system; it has no holy screeds or sacred tenets. It is merely a tool, a method of gleaning knowledge, and the language used in reference to it should reflect this.

What on earth am I ranting about? Well, it goes back a few years to the Discovery Institute, and spans all the way to the present with Ben Stein’s film Expelled. The intelligent design/evolution debate has become quite the pop topic, and hence, the endless battle of science vs. religion has come into everyday discussion as well. Everyday people in normal daily settings run through these issues, turning any public place into a potential battleground.

I’ve heard a lot of the less experienced science advocates say things about science that frankly aren’t accurate. While these people mean very well, they fail to frame their debates properly, and the content of the discussion suffers for it. Since science vs. religion has become as much a layman’s debate as an expert’s one, I think the time has come for those of us on the science side of things to agree on the language we should use.

I have no expertise in science, religion or philosophy, I have no refined understanding of the psychology of persuasion, and I am no orator. However, I still have the gall to make a few semantic suggestions for any person who plans to engage in a lengthy discussion on evolution, intelligent design, or the general clash between religion and science. My tips, and their justifications, are as follows: (more…)

For three decades I’ve puzzled about the idea held by Christian Fundamentalists that the Bible must be proven absolutely and literally true in every way, or else Christianity is false. The latter clause being accepted as silly, therefore most science of the 19th and 20th century is patently on the wrong course.

I think I finally get it: It isn’t so much about the whole Bible, as about a literal Adam and Eve and serpent and fruit. If one even momentarily entertains the idea that this particular tiny part of the Bible is allegorical, then where is the original sin? If A particular orphan named Adam didn’t bite of a particular forbidden fruit, then the underlying momentary lapse of ancestral judgment for which Christians claim God holds all living people responsible didn’t happen. Therefore Jesus died in vain, if one belongs to a congregation for whom Original Sin is The Big One.

Therefore, one must reject the geology, astronomy, and functional biology as was available to 19th century discoverers like Darwin. One must also reject all the subsequent discoveries that frustratingly and consistently reiterate his conclusions, like the periodic table, plate tectonics, cell biology, quantum theory, biochemistry, radiological dating, germ theory, cosmology, dark matter/string theory, genetics, chaos theory, and so on. If it can cast doubt on the timing or existence of biblical original sin, it must be wrong.

It makes perfect sense, in a narrow world view sort of way.

Many people still bristle at the idea that chimpanzees can have “cultures.” The evidence is accumulating, however, as documented in “Almost Human,” an article found in the April, 2008 edition of National Geographic. The article was written by Mary Roach, with incredible photos by Franz Lanting.

In 2007, an Iowa State University anthropologist named Jill Pruetz reported that while studying chimpanzees in the field (two years earlier) she noticed a female chimp:

Sharpening a branch with her teeth and wielding it like a spear. She used it to stab at a bush baby–a pocket-sized, tree dwelling nocturnal primate that springs from branch to branch like a grasshopper. Until that report, the regular makings of tools for hunting and killing mammals had been considered uniquely human behavior. Over a span of 17 days at the start of the 2006 rainy season, Pruetz saw the chimps hunting bush babies 13 times. There were 18 sightings in 2007. It would appear the chimps are getting creative.

Pruetz has spent more than four years studying the Fongoli chimpanzees (they are savanna-woodland chimps from eastern Senegal, across the border from western Mali). Pruetz has been habituating the Fongoli chimps (allowing them to get used to her) for the past three summers. She has done this hot, filthy and exhausting work six days a week, from dawn to dusk. She has gotten sick with malaria seven times. In the course of watching the Fongoli champs, she has also noticed them engaging in other behaviors unique to these Fongoli chimps: “soaking in a water hole and passing the afternoon in caves.”

Spearing bush babies is only the most recent of the many cultural behaviors documented regarding chimpanzees. Jane Goodall was the first to report seeing chimps making tools (for termite fishing). The world-famous bonobo named Kanzi has learned hundreds of symbols to communicate. This National Geographic article reports numerous other behaviors unique to various communities of chimpanzees have been documented. Some communities of chimpanzees use rocks to smash open nuts much like we would use hammers and anvils. Other champs chew leaves into a spongy wad to soak up water for drinking. Several communities of chimps cool down by a wading into pools of water. Numerous communities of chimpanzees throw rocks, sometimes as weapons and other times as part of displays.

The article notes that chimpanzees and humans share between 95 and 98% of their genomes. The article cautions, however, that this is “less meaningful than it sounds. Humans share more than 80% of their gene sequence with mice, and maybe 40% with lettuce.”

The author of this article, Mary Roach, was surprised to learn that chimpanzees’ yawns are contagious, “both among each other and to humans.” In the course of writing this article, she also learned that chimps laugh, and even get upset if someone laughs at them. They sometimes spit in disgust. Some chimps have been known to adopt other species of animals (one chimp named Tia adopted a small kitten).

Chimps get up to get snacks in the middle of the night. They lie on their backs and do “the airplane” with their children. They kiss. Shake hands. Pick their scabs before they’re ready.

The observations reported in this article certainly blur the cultural boundary between humans and chimpanzees. These sorts of observations will make many people upset, however. They want to believe that humans are sui generis among animals, of their own kind and that there is no real comparison, certainly no cultural comparison between humans and animals of any other species.  In fact, there are hordes of people who resist thinking of humans as animals at all (and see here) (and here and here).

Perhaps it won’t soothe the critics to view the situation in the way suggested by a famous evolutionary biologist:

It is perhaps less problematic to view the situation as does The Third Chimpanzee author Jared Diamond: Not that chimps are a kind of human, but that humans are a kind of chimp.

This is an article that truly transported me around the world. It made me feel that I was almost there, observing these magnificent animals. As I’ve commented before, this type of writing and photography is nothing out of the ordinary for the National Geographic.

Ask David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of GAO. Here’s what he said in a Dec 17, 2007 speech at the National Press Club:

“If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and there would be talk about whether the company’s management and directors needed a major shake-up.” Walker urged greater transparency and accountability over the federal government’s operations, financial condition, and fiscal outlook . . .

“The federal government’s fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007, up more than $2 trillion from September 30, 2006, and an increase of more than $32 trillion from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000,” Walker said. “This translates into a current burden of about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American household.”

[Emphasis Added].

In his earlier post, Erich pointed out the justifiable contempt we should all have for guys like McClellan & Powell, who repeatedly lied to the American people about the Iraq threat and helped lead our nation into an unnecessary and horribly costly invasion. However, I believe McClellan’s revelations expose a much deeper problem. McClellan was a fellow Texan and long-time friend of George Bush. We now know that he is a morally bankrupt liar. So here’s my question: how would a morally bankrupt liar like Scott McClellan remain such a good friend to George Bush if Bush were not also a morally bankrupt liar? Certainly we cannot always judge a person by the company he keeps, but when we see the long line of dishonest people coming out of Bush’s administration, we really should wonder how far into the Bush White House the moral bankruptcy reaches. Birds of a feather often do flock together. The takeaway: given all the corruption we know about in the Bush Administration, how many more things exist that we don’t (yet) know about?

This is great news! The U.S. Senate has slapped down the FCC’s December 2007 invitation to allow big media corporations to further consolidate their media holdings.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a co-sponsor of the bill disapproving of the FCC invitation to further consolidate big media, had urged the House to follow the Senate’s lead and pass a resolution of disapproval, an unusual legislative maneuver that would invalidate the FCC’s decision to allow TV and radio stations and newspapers to be co-owned in the top 20 markets, subject to some conditions.