As I was sitting in the Jury holding area last week, I began to read volume one of the “Centennial History of the Civil War” by Bruce Catton: “The Coming Fury“.

Between periods of listening for my number to be called, I plunged into the 1860 presidential primaries. Those left wing liberal Republicans had the good-old-boy Democrats running in circles. Except that the main issue was homeland integrity instead of Homeland Security, the machinations seemed quite similar to recent news. That is, allowing for technological and social context.

We now know that the issue was powerful enough to split the conservative party down the middle, the liberal party won the election, and then the country split across the middle. Those were interesting times, in the Chinese Proverb sense.

This year the same formerly conservative party (”Democrats”) have as front runners two Senators who would have been ineligible to vote or own property in 1860. Some things do change.

But to keep this post short, a more recent historical note. I had cut this political cartoon from a paper some weeks less than 16 years ago and found it in my desk recently:

While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.

The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood of the animal is drained from its body in the belief that,

…the energy contained in blood of an animal sacrifice opens a channel of direct communication with the Orishas.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/santeri1.htm

(Orishas are the multitude of gods that represent various aspects of life, much as in the Hindu pantheon or the Christian saints.)

The question that first occurred to me when I read this was “Who figured this out?”

I mean, there is no Santeria “bible”, it’s an oral tradition. Someone somewhere in Africa got it in her head that the blood of animals somehow “speaks” to her God and she was persuasive enough to convince others that it was true. So persuasive in fact, that people are still doing it to this day just because a teacher tells them to, even though there is no “written word of God” to back her up.

The original priestess of Santeria must have been wishing really hard for something big and when she killed a goat her wish came true. She deduced that it was the killing that caused the good thing to happen and I can only assume she followed that up with more killing and more good luck.

The second thought that occurred to me was, “How do they know it still works?”

For that matter, how does anyone who prays know that their message is reaching God and that God will act on their request? In a recent scientific study it was proven that prayer is usless from a medical standpoint.

Distant prayer and the bedside use of music, imagery and touch (MIT therapy) did not have a significant effect upon the primary clinical outcome observed in patients undergoing certain heart procedures, researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and seven other leading academic medical institutions across the U.S. have found.

“Prayers for the sick and healing-touch are among the most widely practiced healing traditions around the world,” said Mitchell Krucoff, MD, interventional cardiologist at Duke and lead author of the study. “As widespread as these practices are, few rigorous studies exist to explain any mechanism of action or reliable measures of safety or effectiveness. While many of us are fascinated culturally or philosophically with the mystery of healing and prayer, for the practice of medicine we need to understand these phenomena with data-driven insight.”

I’m sure this is old news for regular readers of DI, but I decided to conduct a personal (i.e. anecdotal, unscientific) experiment of my own. So that I couldn’t be accused of persecuting anyone’s religion, I decided to put my own family’s faith in the spotlight. (I was raised Roman Catholic.)

I thought back over the years to the many times that members of my family were in major medical distress and we prayed for help. Did it work? Let’s see…

Great Aunt Mary: Cancer.

Her sisters, my grandmother included, were avid churchgoers all their lives. They prayed for Mary for many months as she suffered with her disease.

Result: Aunt Mary died.

Cousin Jeremy: Because he was born with a heart defect Josh needed periodic surgeries to expand his chest cavity to accommodate the growing organ. At 12 years of age during one such operation his body became wracked with infection. Our family prayed for him.

Result: Jeremy died.

Baby Jake: My sister’s son became feverish and was diagnosed with meningitis. We were all asked to pray for him.

Result: Jake got better.

Lynne: My cousin’s wife was 37 years old with three small children when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We prayed like we’d never prayed before.

Result: Lynne died.

Rose: The 38 year old sister of a close friend discovered a tumor on her spine. She was a single mother of a small daughter. His family and my family both prayed for her.

Result: Rose died.

That’s 1 out of 5. Pretty lousy track record if you ask me.

What did we do wrong? Are we a bad family whose members deserve to die painful tragic deaths? As far as I can tell we are no better or worse than anyone else.

I wonder if the practitioners of Santeria fare better statistically than Catholics. Even the proverbial flip of the coin, 50/50, would be a big improvement! I’d like to know because if draining the blood from a screaming animal can increase my odds of getting what I want and save my family from untimely death…I’m joining!

There are other ways to keep older minds active. These other activities involve contributing to society rather than hiding out with a word puzzle.

I am really getting tired of reading articles that advise “elderly” people to pass the hours doing crossword puzzles in order to keep their minds healthy and active.  It’s really hard to think of anything more self-centered or useless then sitting at home, alone, and filling in the little squares to pass the time. Maybe it’s the sort of thing you would do if stranded in a lifeboat, waiting to be rescued, but why spend your precious hours on Earth this way when there are so many valuable ways to spend your time?

Am I exaggerating when I suggest there is a lot of this misguided crossword puzzle advice directed to elderly people?  Not at all.  You can spend an entire day reading articles if you Google “elderly crossword puzzle mind.” Check out this story from NPR.  And take a look at this and this and this. 

Who are the “elderly” in the context of these articles?  Presumably everyone who’s elderly or becoming elderly.  Presumably, that includes everyone who’s not “young.”  The bottom line of these articles is that we must do crossword puzzles or else our minds will atrophy. These article argue that our brains won’t shrivel up as long as we contemplate “14 across” and “43 down” (at least until we give up and look up the answer).  Telling a person to play crossword puzzles has that same snake-oil ring that recently publicized “mind development technique,” Baby Einstein.

I am aware that by dissing crossword puzzles I risk incurring the wrath of the millions of people who love doing crossword puzzles.  And I realize that some crossword puzzles do require some quite a bit of work.  But those who excel at these puzzles are not necessarily well-rounded.  They merely have the skill of being able to seek out and retain inert facts–facts that don’t require one to have an integrated view of what it means to be alive. In this respect, crossword puzzles are akin to trivia contests.  Both activities are opportunities to feel as though one has accomplished something merely by flinging about inert facts.

I am not saying that all people should stop doing crossword puzzles.  If you like doing it, have at it.  All of us like to take breaks from the stress of the real world.   But we don’t usually honor the way we take those breaks.  For instance, I occasionally play Tetris to “escape.”  I would be flabbergasted, though, were someone to tell me that I need to keep my mind sharp by playing a video game.

To the extent we truly value our senior citizens, there are numerous meaningful and mind-exercising activities available to them.  Why do we keep insulting them as though they are half-brain-dead when most of them aren’t?  Certainly, there are some elderly folks who have serious conditions (Alzheimer’s) that limit their ability to stay connected with their communities and to contribute to their society.  Perhaps word puzzles give them relief and I am not criticizing them.  For those who are not limited in their abilities, though (and many elderly people never face any form of dementia), it is not necessary to do crossword puzzles to maintain an active mind.  There are hundreds of other activities that both challenge the mind but also contribute to society. (more…)

In his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman cites some statling numbers regarding American attitudes toward miscegenation.  The good news is that we are changing for the better, at least viewed in the long term:

Beyond the blunt, crude fact that America is getting less white, there’s a more uplifting reason to believe that the political exploitation of race may be losing its force: As a nation we’ve become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of marriages between whites and blacks, while 54 percent disapproved. As late as 1991 only a plurality of 48 percent approved. By 2002, however, 65 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages; by June 2007, that was up to 77 percent.

According to National Geographic’s Genographic Project, we are all African.  The DNA tests taken in many isolated native populations conclusively demonstrate that we are all no more than 2000 generations removed from Africa.  If you’d like, sign up and learn the path of your own migration out of Africa for only $100.  I do mean “only $100,” because it is a modern miracle that scientists in a laboratory can unravel that tiny history book buried in your DNA.  The story of DNA is really the study of miracle upon miracle.  What else can you say about a package so small that it can fit inside of an invisible cell yet, when unfolded, that same single cell’s worth of DNA stretches six feet?

It is a marvelous thing that we are all African.  Further, DNA studies have determined that we are all descended from an African Adam and Eve (though Adam never actually met Eve).  That we all share common ancestors means that we are all cousins.  You are my cousin.  Randomly pick the next person walking down the sidewalk.  That’s your cousin.  Go visit a great art gallery.  Your cousins painted all of the paintings.  Next time you see the cops slapping cuffs on a car thief, try to feel a little more empathy for the guy in cuffs, because he’s your cousin.  That we are all so closely related is a special treat for those of us who have adopted children from around the world.  In my case, it means that I am biologically related to my (adopted) Chinese children—such wonderful joyous irony!

That we are all one family is a huge triumph of science, a finding that might someday counteract the bigoted tendencies of many political organizations and religions.  Many of us, of all skin hues, had ancestors who migrated out of Africa together.  Our DNA is 99% identical to the DNA of any other person on Earth.  With this information provided by dedicated scientists, we now know that we are all related to every group of “chosen people.”  There’s no need to allocate magic real estate to particular “special” people.  Whoever those chosen people are, we’re their cousins. Therefore each of us is “chosen” and “special” too.  Let’s not kill each other over magic real estate any more.

These high-tech modern biological achievements should make us think twice whenever we hear others talking about “them.”   Any sort of “them,” any outgroup.  That we are all African should make us extremely wary of using the term “race.”  We’re all one race, though with different features and shades of brown.

Now that it is clearer than ever that we are all African, it is clearer that those who ask about race are racists.  Those who aren’t racists don’t think about “race” because they have no use for its gross over-generalizations.

I agree with the following distinction between geographic and “racial” distinctions: 

There is nothing wrong with using geographic labels to designate people.  Major continental terms are just fine, and sub-regional refinements such as Western European, Eastern African, Southeast Asian, and so forth carry no unintentional baggage. In contrast, terms such as “Negroid,” “Caucasoid,” and “Mongoloid” create more problems than they solve. Those very terms reflect a mix of narrow regional, specific ethnic, and descriptive physical components with an assumption that such separate dimensions have some kind of common tie. Biologically, such terms are worse than useless. Their continued use, then, is in social situations where people think they have some meaning.

On a lighter note, I can now fully justify the way in which I’ve been handling demographic forms for the past ten years or so.   For “race,” I’ve been checking the box next to “African” (though I’ve never done this to obtain any sort of benefit).  I’ve chosen “African” because that is where the evidence is increasingly pointing—that we are, indeed, African.  All of us.  Learn to love this thought–it is something you hold in common with every person you’ve ever admired.

So let’s remind our jingoist leaders of these new findings of biology whenever they get carried away talking about an ominous group of “them.”  Let’s remind those who divide that whoever “they” are, “they” are part of our big biological family and we should always be putting more energy into getting along with them than into dividing our family or to getting ready to start what would inevitably be another internecine war.   Let’s remind the dividers of the world that the use of “race” is always, at bottom a coarse exercise of power.  In fact it is the “power of an illusion.”

So do consider spending that $100 with the Genographic Project or, at least, thinking about doing it.   If for no other reason, do it for a clearer worldview.  Do it for your cousins. 

Just ask the Republican Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders. I applaud him for his willingness to keep an open heart and mind.

National Geographic’s Genographic Project offers all of us an extraordinary opportunity: a method of tracing each of our family trees back to our African roots.  Yes, each of us is African.  An ever-growing collection of DNA studies unambiguously demonstrate that each of us had ancestors who lived in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. 

Dr. Spencer Wells, a population geneticist, is in charge of a team of scientists responsible for tracing human migrations out of Africa, from which they populated the entire world. The team is getting the job done by taking DNA samples from indigenous cultures around the world.  As you’d imagine, time is of the essence, because the world’s populations are in constant flux and, according to literature I received from the Genographic project, “many genetic signals are being scrambled.”

Dr. Wells and his team have utilized markers on to relatively stable genetic components (mitochondrial DNA) to determine that there is a genetic ancestor shared by every person alive today.  She has been dubbed “Eve” and it appears that she lived in Africa approximately 150,000 years ago.  One other stable genetic component is located on Y chromosomes, which are passed from fathers to sons.  This too indicates another coalescence point, indicating that we all share a male African ancestor scientists call “Adam,” who lived approximately 60,000 years ago.  The Genographic project literature indicates that Adam looked very much like a still existing yet relatively isolated group of African bushmen.  

It is startling to consider that each of us is separated from “Adam” by no more than 2,000 generations. In my mind, there is no better medicine to racism and political divisions than to consider that we are all cousins, no matter how different we appear to be from each other.

“Adam’s” descendents traveled across Africa’s savannas and forests in search of food and water (over the years, climate change made it imperative to keep up with the moving livestock).  Some of these lines of biologically modern humans migrated all the way to Australia.  This Australian migration is substantiated by the existence of highly specific genetic markers found in the DNA of Australian aboriginal males.  50,000 years ago, sea levels were lower and there would have been a way to walk along the coasts of Saudi Arabia, India and Southeast Asia in order to get to Australia.  In fact, Lake Mungo in Australia contains a grave that could be as much as 60,000 years old, making it the earliest known site of human habitation outside of Africa.

Other migrations have been documented into Eurasia and through Siberia, across the Bering land Bridge (this bridge existed when sea levels were low) into North and South America.  According to more compelling genetic evidence, this migration into the Americas occurred no earlier than 20,000 years ago.  The genetic evidence also suggests that the people who originally populated the Americas sprung from a group of perhaps one-dozen people who crossed the Bering land Bridge.

The ability to analyze migratory patterns of humans based upon genetic information is truly inspiring.  “The greatest history book ever written,” Wells says, “is the one hidden in our DNA.”

The Genographic project is ambitious.  It is a five-year program to collect at least 100,000 DNA samples from the world’s remaining indigenous in traditional people.  The work is being done by genetic laboratories around the world.

In addition to arriving at general conclusions regarding migratory patterns of humans, the Genographic project offers something for you too.  For $100, the Genographic project will provide you with a kit with which you can collect your own cheek cells before submitting them for analysis.  My seven-year-old daughter quickly gathered her own cheek cells recently, without complaint, and we are now awaiting her test results. The genetic testing done on your cheek cells

will indicate the maternal or paternal genetic markers those ancestors bequeathed you thousands of years ago, which chart your remote ancestors migratory wanderings and indicate from which branch you hang on the global family tree.

After being tested, you have the option of providing additional information to help National Geographic better understand the “twigs and branches” of human migratory patterns. To arrange to be tested, go here and click on “How to Participate.”  The same site offers an overview of genetics, an analysis of the human journey, and educational videos regarding the project.

I recently discussed American foreign policy with an attorney over lunch.  Over the years, this fellow had generally shown himself to be thoughtful on many issues.  He is a meticulous lawyer, charged with parsing out bits of relevant evidence regarding the dozens of cases on which he works every day.

It eventually became clear that he fully supported the U.S. attack on Iraq, though he was agonized over how badly the “war” was going.  Why did he support the Iraq invasion?  This is where the conversation got strange:  Because of what “they” did to us (allegedly the 9/11 attacks).  It’s because of what “they” planned to do (impose Muslim culture on all Americans).  It’s because of what “they” stand for (”they hate freedom”).   Further, we simply need to make them pay.   We can’t let “them” get away with what “they” did on 9/11.  

It became clear through this conversation that, for my acquaintance, all Muslim countries are the same.  None of them can be trusted.  All of them are at least somewhat guilty for 9/11.   I challenged his over-generalizations, but my acquaintance would not back off.  For him, all Muslims are bad.  Further, it was clear to him that we couldn’t do nothing about 9/11.  Doing something (no matter what it was) is far better than doing nothing.

It has repeatedly occurred to me that without the federal government’s 6-year national license to engage in bigotry and misdirected vengefulness, the invasion of Iraq would have been extremely difficult to sell. Based upon numerous conversations I’ve had with people who supported the Iraq invasion, bigotry and misdirected vengefulness justified their support of the invasion.  For many people these things continue to justify any future U.S. military action in the Middle East.  “They” have it coming.

In “The Real Lessons of 9/11,” Gary Kamiya does a much-needed psychological analysis on those people who have supported the sustained and misdirected U.S. military violence in the Middle East.  Kamiya has really thought things through.  Kamiya’s Salon.com article is an extraordinary piece of writing.  The bottom line is that the mainstream media has not questioned the shameful emotions and ideology that justified Bush’s crusade in the minds of all too many people.  Here are a few excerpts from the article, but I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole thing:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated.

Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror,” of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the “front line.” The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush’s “war on terror” was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead.

Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Senator Larry Craig’s defiant claim that he is “not gay” is an interesting one.  He didn’t say “I don’t hang around in public restrooms where men commonly have sex with men.”  He said he was not “gay.” 

Is it possible for a man to have sex with other men but not be “gay”?  I suspect that most people would claim that a man who has sex with other men is, by that very fact, “gay.” But is it that simple?

Scientist Alfred Kinsey argued that “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” were both located on the same continuum running from “Exclusively heterosexual” to “Exclusively homosexual.”  This continuum is represented in Kinsey’s scale of sexual orientation.  He argued that society’s efforts to pigeonhole people into one type or the other was a political move.  It was possible, according to Kinsey, that a man (or a woman) might be predominantly heterosexual, but only incidentally homosexual.  Perhaps, this is what Senator Craig meant when he claimed that he was not “gay.”  Perhaps he was honestly (and desperately) claiming that he liked sex with women as a rule, though he did the public restroom gig with other men on the side.

Senator Craig obviously feels the pain of the “gay” label a lot more than he feels the pain of being caught in a restroom where men commonly have sex with other men.  Thus, his continued protests denying his alleged homosexuality.   But maybe he’s protesting the “gay” label for yet another reason.   Maybe he is honestly (and desperately) trying to communicate that he only has physical sex with men, but no emotional relationships.  Preposterous?  Not really.

Consider the numerous men who, though married to women and though living public lives as straight men, have repeated episodes of uncommitted sex with other men.   Salon.com did an extensive piece on this phenomenon in African American communities.  There, it’s called “on the down low,” or the D.L., where men lead seemingly straight lives but have sex with other men.  There’s even a long tradition of how a man should solicit sex from another man in adjoining bathroom stalls–the flashing of a wedding ring in the process even makes it all the more alluring to some participants.

This phenomenon of the “down low” is not limited to African American communities.   Consider this statistics reported by Medicinenet.com:

Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.
And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.
This means safe-sex messages aimed at straight and gay men are likely missing this important subgroup . . .

There are many other examples of men who have sex with other men who don’t consider themselves “homosexual” or “gay.”  These “situational homosexual” acts are reputed to be common on long tours of duty on ships and in prisons.   (more…)

Once in a while, I tune into KJSL, a St. Louis Christian talk radio station.  I do this as part of a conscious effort to make myself listen to people with views that are dramatically different from my own.  Perhaps I will understand those views better if I take the time to listen more.

While I was driving last week, the station featured a show called “News and Views,” hosted by a man named “Dr. Larry Bates.”  The host repeatedly painted the future of the US as bleak, thanks to irresponsible financial policies by the federal government.  Because I have some sympathy with that general conclusion, I continued to listen.  It turned out that Bates was predicting the imminent financial collapse of the United States.  Although I doubted that conclusion, I continued to listen.

Bates then indicated that he is also a big proponent of religious “End Times.”  In short, he believes that Jesus will soon be returning to Earth in order to sort things out.  I have no sympathy for this religious view.  In fact, I find End Times beliefs to be irresponsible and destructive for the numerous reasons.  For example, I do not hold the Bible to be inerrant. Based on my study of the Bible, although it offers some good stories and some reasonable moral instruction, it is also rife with bad advice, contradictions and senseless violence.

“Dr. Larry Bates” wears many hats.  He claims to be an economist, publisher, editor, former member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, former bank CEO and a “nationally recognized expert on political systems and the Federal Reserve.”  Bates is also the President of First American Monetary Consultants, Inc. (FAMC), an organization that allegedly does “economic and market forecasting, in addition to offering a wide variety of other End Times services.  “News and Views” is a syndicated radio show, available dozens of radio stations across the U.S.  Larry Bates is thus well known in some circles.

After listening to Bates for only a few minutes, I learned that the United States needs to immediately and mercilessly bomb Iran because of what “those people” have done to “support terrorism.”  I also learned that we need to support Israel without question, based upon what the Bible says.  I persevered to the end of the show, saddened by and frustrated with the flimsy manner in which Bates attempted to support his conclusions. 

At the end of the show, it was announced that Bates was going to be featured at a half-day conference in St. Louis, I took the bait.  I thought it would be interesting to better understand the basis for the views of End Times (both economic End Times and religious End Times) proponents. The conference was called “Perilous Times: Significant End Time Events.”  I paid $20 and showed up at the Crystal Ballroom of the Renaissance St. Louis Grand and Suites Hotel in downtown St. Louis.  Here’s my ticket:

                              
At the registration desk, I received a folder full of information.   One of the pamphlets advised me that legalized gay marriage is a major obstacle to democracy:

When the US Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas last year that sodomy is a constitutional ‘right,’ the director of the lambda legal fund-a radical homosexual-agenda of pressure group-gleefully explained that this marks the beginning of the end to traditional marriage.

Another pamphlet advised that the United States is officially a Judeo-Christian nation.  It quoted William Penn: “Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.”  This pamphlet, printed by FAMC, “proves” that the United States is a Christian nation based upon the fact that the Constitutions of many of the states mention “God,” or “the Creator.”  As though non-Christian religions don’t believe in a “God” or a “Creator.”

There were numerous products displayed and advertised at the conference.  These products are the sorts of things you’ll need to have if you are going to be prepared for the economic and religious End Times.  If you want to prevent cancer, you need to load up on Glutathione.  The pamphlet says “your life depends on Glutathione.”  To buy it, contact FAMC, according to the pamphlet. 

What if you just want to make sure that you have access to “the most universal antibiotic” known to man, colloidal silver?  It’s a “tasteless, odorless, non-toxic, purer, natural substance consisting of submicroscopic clusters of silver particles suspended by a tiny electric charge placed on each particle.” According to the pamphlet, you drink it.  It kills all those pesky pathogens and protects all your good cells.  According to the pamphlet, it is useful for treating allergies, boils, herpes, stomach flu, lime disease, gonorrhea, bladder irritations and chickenpox.  The list goes on and on.   Colloidal silver can be used vaginally, anally or dropped into the eyes.”  You can even make your own colloidal silver out of silver wire, using the $189 generator you can buy from FAMC. 

Another pamphlet advised me of my right to participate in jury nullification whenever anyone is being prosecuted for a gun crime. That is because “corrupted, anti-gun prosecutors and judges are common.”  This information is distributed by the Fully Informed Jury Association.

After the economic collapse, you’ll need to make better use of all that expensive gasoline that all of us are going to need.  Therefore, make sure you buy the “Power Plus Mpg” additive.  Using this Power Plus, you can save 25 to $.50 per gallon.  During his talk (which I’ll discuss in detail further down), Larry Bates bragged that his 5 mpg SUV improved its mileage 50% (to 7.5 mpg) after he started using this Power Plus.  Those attending the conference were even invited to sign up as Power Plus distributors. 

Additional Pamphlets were available advising how to support efforts to find those “30,000 POWs [who] were known to be behind alive after WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf and War on Terror.”  There was also a table full of conservative-message bumper stickers.    

The nice old fellow minding that table offered me a chance to take any one of those bumper stickers for free.  (more…)

The title to this post is from a bumper sticker shown in “Generation Chickenhawk,” a video shot last week by Max Blumenthal. The scene?  The College Republican National Convention in Washington D.C.

Here’s proof that our young Republicans love wars as long as others do the fighting. 

Blumental’s ten-minute video is well worth watching if you’re looking for unassailable evidence that neocons are actually members of the political equivalent of a fundamentalist religion.  Interesting to see that Tom Delay still has a willing audience.

In his blog at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald describes the core mentality of those who remain pro-war:

We need to prove to the world how powerful and tough and strong we are by kicking ass and starting wars and putting our boots on the ground and getting our hands dirty and bombing and invading and fighting like the Real Warriors we are because Civilization is at Risk. And the way we should do that is by sending those people — the ones way, way over there — to go and fight and risk their lives in the wars I love.

More than ever, Iraq remains a battle over hearts and minds.   The site of the battle is not only Iraq, however.  The battle is being fought right here in the U.S., with the corporate media serving as an ally to those who prefer the status quo.   The status quo is the inevitable result of the lack of information regarding the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I wouldn’t make this up. It was reported on MSNBC today.

Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.

How does the Pope know this?   Hey, he just knows.  Just like he knows that gay unions are “”pseudo-matrimony.”  Just like he knows that we shouldn’t read Harry Potter novels. Just as he knows that it is better for millions of Africans to die of AIDS than to use condoms.  He knows that evolution has not been scientifically proven.  And he knows that limbo no longer exists.  And he knows that women are inferior and that there is a Devil and he knows that a virgin had a baby.  And he knows that Catholicism purified indigenous populations.  Although he doesn’t believe in slavery, even though the Bible clear says that it’s OK to own a slave. 

One Vatican official was quoted as saying that the Pope’s position is “not backtracking on ecumenical commitment.”   Of course not.  The Catholics are still willing to get together with people of other religions–as long as those other religions acknowledge that they are “defective” and “not true churches.”  Maybe the Catholics could simply put “Member of Defective Religion” labels on the chairs for the people from the other religions, so that they will know where to sit.

It’s time for all of those defective false chuches to get with the Pope’s pronouncement or else all their followers will burn in hell, by the eternal and boundless love of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior.  Amen.

It’s really difficult for me to understand how a man of this unusual intellect can repeatedly graner great attention from the media and and further receive constant warm affection from tens of millions of Americans.

A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over and soon to feel more justified in that opinion. The CNN article, with a video, is at this link:

I stumbled across a very old post I made to a philosophy BBS on the subject, and I thought I’d revise it and repost it here. This present a good opportunity. Upon reading it, though, I admit to having a few second thoughts, but one of the joys of having a mind one is unafraid to use is that second, third, and tenth thoughts are part of the fun.

What is Tolerance? Broad question. It might well be the wrong question. The trouble is, like other things people discuss endlessly without resolution, it has as many exceptions as definitions. Tolerance and its parameters goes to the root of our civilization. Not for the reasons we might immediately assume—which is that we have a pluralistic society and the requirement of such is a broader degree of tolerance than what has ordinarily been found in most history—but for more individualized reasons. Because we all are intolerant of something and someone at one time or another, and it is not always wrong of us to be so. When you look at this so-called “pluralistic society” one feature bobs to the surface that doesn’t seem to fit: we’ve never been particularly tolerant. Wave after wave of newcomer has had to go through the same round of bigotry from those of us who consider ourselves “born Americans.” Not everyone, of course, but look at the record. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hispanics (who were first tossed out of their home and in the subsequent decades came back as if they’d never been here before and had to prove they deserved to live here), and on and on. Today it’s Bosnians, Vietnamese, more Chinese, Africans of various nationalities… Those of us with birth certificates claiming we are, right from the get-go, Americans…well, look at the news. What we have entered is a period of enforced public tolerance, in which it is simply uncouth and, in some instances, illegal to express displeasure at the presence of someone Not Us.

Religion may be the last bastion of intolerance, as indicated by the fracas in the Senate. It is arguable that we should tolerate all religious views. If one believes that one’s religion demands that he or she kill those who do not believe the same way, should we tolerate the religion? Traditionally in this country, it is more what someone does than what they believe that causes legal action, but we’ve always questioned that. Look at the lives ruined in the 50s because of a flirtation by some with communism. In most instances, the affair ended, nothing lasting resulted, but because “you attended these meetings” you faced the opprobrium of the community. It’s like a politician having sex with the “wrong person”—years go by, it’s never done again, life goes one, but if someone finds out…

Tolerance follows trends. Sad but true. I know devoutly religious people who now accept gay people on their own merits, but would throw a divorcee out of one of their parties. Consistency there isn’t. That’s trendiness, not genuine, thoughtful tolerance. So let’s try for a definition.

Tolerance means: not making a person suffer for being an individual.

Sounds easy enough on the faced of it, but it has some wrinkles that feed into our current, present-day problems. Legally, we place more importance on actions than intent. Intent becomes important when the severity of an action is in question, but there still must be An Action before—legally—we start in on someone. But as we all know, a single action successfully prosecuted leads often to a label that goes directly to an assumption of future intent. A criminal who has been caught, tried, convicted, and serves his or her sentence finds that full citizenship is never restored. The system expects recidivism and so the balance of that person’s life is constrained by assumptions of possible behavior. (Never mind for the moment the statistics on recidivism—we’re talking about ideals here, and who’s to say that our treatment of these folks isn’t part and parcel of the motivating force behind that recidivism?) Basically, such folks have shown themselves capable of certain behaviors of which the community is intolerant and so become part of a population designated as untrustworthy. On that basis, we do not tolerate them. In some instances, our intolerance goes so far as to bar residency to them in certain areas and to post their names in public, making them pariahs. In some instances, no crime has been committed to engender similar, non-legal actions.

But this has, ultimately, nothing to do with the individual so treated. It has to do with our idea of that individual. It’s a box, wherein we place people to make it easy to deal with the complexities of our so-called pluralistic society. Some people get very, very tired of going through this daily coping with Strange People, and demand that “We Do Something About Them!” Hence protests at prayer meetings. Simpler if such people, who think differently, dress differently, talk differently, pray to a different god, were just Not Here. The Nazis had that idea. The problem is, of course, that we are all Strange People if you dig deep enough. But the urge to Belong causes such denial of self that our individuality turns on itself, like an autoimmune disease, like cancer.

Look at Senator Vitter. One of the loudest advocates of so-called Family Values, and look at this, his name is on the client list of a bordello. To reduce him to the simplest explanation, he so abhors his own inability to be someone else that he seeks to eliminate all possibility that he could ever stray, which means vociferously advocating against lifestyles other than the one to which he wishes to adhere. Take away all the temptation and he won’t “stray” again. It never occurs to someone like that that maybe his own self-abnegation is more a problem than the behaviors he seeks to legislate out of existence. (A less kind explanation is that he belongs to a clique of long tradition which seeks to establish conditions in which the behavior for which he’s been pilloried is available only to a self-selected group of elite, and denied to all those “unwashed” and undeserving. This is not at all uncommon, and seems to follow those who are loudest in their condemnations of the very things they secretly indulge. Besides, to be perfectly open and honest about it would mean their spouses ought to be allowed the same privileges and—dare we say it?–rights. Can’t have that. It would be nice to be done with goose-and-gander crap. Alas.)

So how do we tell if we’re being intolerant of someone just for being an individual? How do we know that our intolerance isn’t justified? Well, try this: if you find that you’re condemning someone based solely on a community standard and only that community rule tells you it’s wrong, then more than likely that standard is wrong.

Pretty broad. But consider. Murder is self-evidently wrong. The violent denial of another individual of the freedoms, liberties, options, and potentials that the murderer then retains and that all people who condemn the murderer retain is obvious self-sustaining in the moral sense. You don’t really need a community standard to tell you this, the standard arises from a clearly recognizable maxim. Likewise, theft, lying, rape, battery….the irony being that sometimes community standards are set up to protect certain kinds of theft, lying, rape, and assault.

But conversely, alternate philosophies are not self-evidently wrong in the same way. The value of them must be weighed through examination, comparison, debate, study….a dialogue must occur.

Alternative economic practices are not self-evidently wrong.

Alternative sexual choices are not self-evidently wrong.

Alternative rituals are not self-evidently wrong.

And yet, community standards are established all the time, depending on where you live, to permit and promote the condemnation of people who embrace one or more of the aforementioned, even if only as ideas.

Why? Is such intolerance justified? It depends on how much you value community standards over individuals. People who adhere to a set of community standards not because they believe in them, but because it is easier, because they cannot or will not think for themselves, or out of fear of being expelled from that community are hypocrites and often moral cowards. Lazy at best. But if Joe Bloe and Jane Plane just want to get along, who is anyone to condemn them for not challenging the status quo in the name of personal conviction? Isn’t life hard enough without throwing ideological self-consistency into the mix? Who can blame a person for not wanting to rock the boat in the cause of philosophical freedom?

The problem here is one of long term moral judgment. If you do not understand the nature of what you believe and merely accept what the community tells you, then when something legitimately dangerous or threatening comes along, how do you tell the difference between it and all the noise that is only your neighbor being intolerant of fashion choices? How do you know how to make choices and judgments about new ideas or protect yourself from con jobs and nonsense posing as Ultimate Truth? If you do not know what it means to Be Tolerant, how will you know when Being Tolerant according to community prescription won’t just lose you your rights to be different? And how will you know the difference between self-defense and bigotry?

It is human nature to fear what is different. It is our responsibility to overcome fear. That axiom, if I may call it such, is, I believe, the seed of true tolerance.

Now here’s the catch—and the reason this is so difficult to manage—Tolerance isn’t a prize you win and then take home like a present. It’s a chore. It’s a challenge. You work at it every day, just as you have to work at being free every day. You die working at it and the job is never done. I think a lot of people sense that and shun it. But there it is. And we have to be willing to turn our backs on the comfort of community if we wish to be tolerant and free. By willing I don’t mean we have to—but if forced to a choice between conscience and community, to opt for community is the first cut in the death of tolerance.

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays.  They don’t just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion.  Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process.  Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.”

Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up.  Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays.  No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays.  They are not driven by any sort of philosophy.  In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust.

What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men.   Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout “You’re GAY!”  And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust.

Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality. 

My “gut reaction” has been that disgust is a senseless, arbitrary and unworkable basis for a moral system.  There are many reasons. If disgust is a proper foundation for morality, who gets to decide what is disgusting? The conservative Christians of the United States would certainly step up to claim that right and responsibility.  After all, they claim that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation” and that they are especially inspired and guided by the Creator of the Universe.  They are also quite sure that gay sex is immoral. They never seem to tire of making that public pronouncement.  And why stop at homosexuality? Disgust could also serve as the basis for many other “moral” positions.  Therefore, whoever becomes the arbiter of morality-based-on-disgust would also attempt to educate the rest of us as to the evils of nude beaches, public breast-feeding, body piercing, abortion and euthanasia.

All of us should be wary about accepting disgust as a basis for morality, however.  Demographics are shifting and, someday, conservative Christians might be on the receiving end of moral judgment based upon disgust.  How so?  According to the dictates of other cultures American Christians do all kinds of disgusting things.  They should clean up their own act.  Christians do disgusting things like eating pork and wearing leather. Christian women expose their faces and their legs, they talk with men to whom they are not married and sometimes they kiss men in public.  Christian women are sometimes so bold as to appear in public while they are menstruating.  Christians often use their left hands and they commonly wear shoes inside of their homes.  Their homes are filthy because they often live with dogs and cats-some of them sleep with their pet animals.  They drink shameful substances such as alcohol and milk.  These sorts of “disgusting” things could justify lengthy prison sentences in many cultures.  Shame on Christians!

Whoever we choose our arbiter of disgust, then next step is obvious.  Disgust is a favorite excuse for persecuting members of out-groups.  Disgust is thus the unspoken foundation for bigotry.  European Americans have historically characterized people from Africa and China as “dirty” as the basis for depriving them of basic legal rights and human decencies.  The same thing now goes for gays, who conservative Christians commonly characterize as animalistic and unhygienic. How often have you heard this comment: “What’s next, bestiality?”

At this site, I have often argued that “disgusting” things tend to be those things that remind us that humans are animals.  According to many conservative Christians, though, we are not in the same league as animals, as evidenced by our invisible “souls.”  

We are higher than animals, evidenced by the Chain of Being.  This fits in nicely with the up/down metaphor described by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff.  In Metaphors We Live By, Johnson and Lakoff explain that “virtue, goodness and status” are all seen as “up.”  In Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993), Mark Johnson explores various metaphors for moral character (page 50).  One of the primary metaphors used for moral character is purity/pollution.

The “moral,” rational self is high, while the “lower” self is associated with the body and bodily functions.  This up/down, high/low orientation comes to be correlated with purity versus impurity.  The body, with its passions and desires, ties us to that which is dirty, polluted and computer.  The mind, as the seat of reason and will, tries to maintain its purity of rising above and trying to control the body. (more…)

[This idea was born as a comment here, but I decided to create a separate post out of it].

What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother’s mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years.  The woman at the end of that 300 foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You’d still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. 

Isn’t it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I’m assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago?

Now think even further back.  In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That’s about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute.

It wouldn’t take long to reach the last of your relatives who looks like you. In fact, your trip would have barely begun.  Biologically modern humans (those whose bodies are the functional equivalent of our own bodies) came onto the scene between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.  Driving at highway speed parallel to that line of your own relatives, you’d run out of your biologically modern human relatives less than two-minutes after starting your trip. That’s only 4,000 generations.

If you wanted to drive all the way out to see your shrew-like relatives (at 60 mph), you’d need to drive alongside that entire 3,787 mile long line of relatives.  It sounds daunting, but you could do it in only 63 hours.  That’s only 63 hours of driving to get back to your relatives who were literally shrews!

You can’t possibly write a work of fiction that is more amazing than these facts.

We are all survivors. If any one of those ancestors failed to survive long enough to reproduce, you wouldn’t be there to read this post.  For me, that is an extraordinary thought. Just think of how likely it was that you would never exist, which brings me back to the idea of the post from which this post sprang. 

[After originally publishing this idea, “Ben” wrote this comment]

First and foremost, it would probably only take me 13 seconds to run the football field. That is, if I was not so intrigued by the figures I pass, to stop and have a quick chat. I’m a bit (lot) confused though. My mind can’t seem to get past the first few generations, without straining, then I end up at the end with a rodent. Are the folks (mice) way back at the beginning still my *direct* descendants? Or is there some extinctions or branching out or… okay it is just too hard to comprehend, for me.

Another interesting thing, not that it really matters, but EVERYONE reading this is part “black”.

DNA studies have shown that people shared a common ancestor who lived in Africa between 50,000 to 200,000 years ago. As our ancestors migrated out of Africa into the rest of the world, small changes called mutations occurred in their DNA. As generations passed, each mutation links our ancestor to a specific time and place in history. The mutations that we find in our own DNA tell the story of our own ancestral past.

[My response to Ben]

Ben, after you run past the football field length line, just to get an idea, you may, indeed, come back and chat with some of these folks. 

I would love to see the looks on the faces of so many bigots as they started noticing that the skin color and facial features of their own relatives started to change as they drove past that long line of their relatives. After only one-half mile, only 30 seconds of driving, they would start noticing that they were driving past their ancestors who lived in Africa “only” 60,000 years ago.  They would start noticing their australopithecine ancestors after driving for only 30 minutes.  If those bigots started their hypothetical driving trips from St. Louis, they’d notice their australopithecine Grandmas even before they left the St. Louis area. This makes me wonder . . .  would they get out of their car and hug their hairy naked ancestors or would they vomit? 

Someday I’m going to write a post called “I am African.”  The idea is that it doesn’t matter who you are–you come out of Africa.  Consequently, on the Census form and other forms that ask the meaningless and divisive “race” question, my habit is to check all relevant boxes, including “African,” because that’s where at least some of my ancestors are from. This is a thought that liberates, because it reminds me that we’re not so different from different-looking others after all.

Since my highway drive is a thought experiment–let’s take the thought to an extreme.   Let’s assume that all of your female relatives standing in that line were sexually mature adults. I’d bet you’d think some of those wom