Here is the simple goal for those participating in Naked Bike Ride: Protest our dependency on oil and celebrate the power and individuality of our bodies. In America, most people tend to have a warped attitude toward bicycles. They see bicycles as toys and amusements, not as incredibly efficient and serious modes of transportation. More than anything else, Naked Bike Ride is an attempt to change this attitude and to get people to choose bicycles rather than gas guzzling motor vehicles, whenever possible.

This combination was pure marketing genius. If 1,000 people had assembled in the middle of St. Louis to promote alternative sustainable methods of transportation, the media wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass. Because these organizers promised to wrap this serious message about bicycle riding in a package of nudity, however, the media was there in droves.  Here’s an video interview of two of the organizers.

Now, what kind of nudity did those curious media types actually see when they got to the assembly prior to the bicycle ride? Well, they saw some of this:

As well as some of this:

The evening could also have been accurately called Slogans Painted on Partially Naked People on Bikes Night, but that would have been unwieldy.

This use of nakedness to promote the message that we desperately need to start using sustainable transportation methods has been successfully executed in numerous other cities. Tonight, the event came to my home town. I decided to both participate in a minimally naked way . . .

. . . and report on the St. Louis edition of “Naked Bike Ride.” Yes, the message on my back was not creative. I went for the brutally clear approach.

The St. Louis organizers encouraged participants to push the nakedness to the legal limit, but not more than the limit:

[W]e also met with the police tonight. We wanted you all to know the official word after that meeting. Here’s the city ordinance that they went over with us. We are encouraging strategic coverage of the controversial areas (genitals, buttocks, breasts) but maximum exposure within the law and if people decide to bare it all you need to know that that is in violation of the ordinance and the police have to right to make arrests if there are complaints.

What goes on during Naked Bicycle Night? The cyclists have the opportunity to take a 12-mile bicycle ride on the city streets devoid of gas-slurping automobiles, along with hundreds of other concerned citizens in various states of cycling nudity.

Perhaps you are wondering whether it would be uncomfortable to ride a bicycle while naked. The national organizers dedicated several paragraphs to that topic here.

It might have been more accurate to call it Underwear Bicycle Ride, but there was, indeed, some nakedness, including several people riding totally in the nude. It was hilarious to watch the expressions of the numerous bystanders who saw the totally naked bicycle riders passing. Many of them had that look (”Oh my. It looks like . . . no, it couldn’t be . . . but maybe it is . . . but is that legal?” I would estimate that there were 500 riders tonight. We passed by a several thousand people staring out hotel and restaurant windows but many more cheering on the streets. Many people cheering knew about Naked Bicycle Ride and were lined up along portions of the route.

The crowds often shouted lots of enthusiasm, honked horns, jumped up and down and waved. As we passed through the applauding people early in the ride, a woman riding next to me said, “This is such a rush.” Indeed.

I snapped this shot as my group paused at an intersection in front of a brightly lit gas station. That’s what it’s all about, right?

There were many creative body paintings. Note this woman’s violin motif, for example. I took most of these photos while riding my bicycle, holding onto the bike with my left hand and shooting with the right, without looking through at or through the camera. Given the haphazardness of the situation, I was surprised that I was able to capture so many usable images. As you can see, this includes images of many people conveying the an unsurprisingly coherent political mood.

(more…)

Tonight I watched “It’s Bad For Ya,” George Carlin’s final nationally televised performance. The entire show is available on YouTube (Below is Part I of VII). The show was broadcast live on March 1, 2008, only a few months prior to Carlin’s death (due to a heart attack, on June 22, 2008).

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Carlin opened the show by announcing that he was 70 years old. In Parts I and II, he speaks bluntly about society’s failure to deal frankly with death. It’s impossible to watch this performance without feeling the irony. At one point, he states:

So don’t be afraid to get old. It’s a great time of life. You get to take advantage of people and you’re not responsible for anything! You can even shit in your pants!

He dissects many other topics, including law, religion, children, education and national pride. He shows no patience for the way our culture handles any of these issues. His performance gets especially dark when he asserts that there is essentially no hope for us, ecologically speaking—he predicts that in 40 or 50 more years, the entire planet will be a massive ball of pollution. At many points in the performance, it’s not easy to tell whether Carlin retains any personal optimism. Is his performance intentionally injected with hyperbole or is this really and truly what Carlin thinks. I suspected the latter, but I don’t really know.

I heard many gems during the performance (meaning that I heard many things with which I agree wholeheartedly). Here’s my favorite, this one delivered during the topic of society’s often-stated goal that “we should teach our children to read.”

It’s not important to get children to read. It’s much more important to teach children to question what they read. They should be taught to question everything. Everything they read and everything they hear. They should be taught to question authority . . .

Amen.

What happens when the executive branch is allowed to operate in secrecy and without constraint? This was answered in 1976, by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church:

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which ‘keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

The three main departures in the intelligence field from the constitutional plan for controlling abuse of power have been: (a) Excessive Executive Power.

In a sense the growth of domestic intelligence activities mirrored the growth of presidential power generally. But more than any other activity, more even than exercise of the war power, intelligence activities have been left to the control of the Executive.

For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency.

Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such Executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.

(b) Excessive Secrecy.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. Obviously, public disclosure, of matters such as the names of intelligence agents or the technological details of collection methods is inappropriate. But in the field of intelligence, secrecy has been extended to inhibit review of the basic programs and practices themselves.

Those within the Executive branch and the Congress who would exercise their responsibilities wisely must be fully informed. The American public, as well, should know enough about intelligence activities to be able to apply its good sense to the underlying issues of policy and morality.

Knowledge is the key to control. Secrecy should no longer be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from the American people themselves.

(c) Avoidance of the Rule of Law.

Lawlessness by Government breeds corrosive cynicism among the people and erodes the trust upon which government depends.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

As you can see, the Committee pointed its finger at the government, the public and the press.  Attitudes needed to be changed all around.

This is yet another parallel between modern times and the the Vietnam War era (I realize that that war had ceased by 1976).  Many other parallels were detailed by the movie “War Made Easy.”

The above passage is analyzed in more detail at Common Dreams.

I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.

Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.

After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.

But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :

1. Explain all currently and previously observed facts in the category of interest in terms of natural laws.
2. Describe what facts, if discovered, would prove it false.
3. Make predictions about future (as yet undiscovered) measurements or discoveries, and suggest how these might be found.

As near as I can tell the Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design misses on all three counts. (more…)

Personal anecdote time.

Yesterday (Sunday) we went shopping.  We stopped at Office Depot to buy a new chair.  As we approached the entrance, I spotted a friend of ours and called her name.  We gathered outside the entrance to chat.

As we talked, a man approached us, begged our pardon, and asked for a personal opinion.

“Do any of you know what that is?” he asked, pointing across the parking lot.

That is a tower under contruction adjacent to a one-story building that used to be a bank and is now The Islamic Community Center.  We’ve been watching the tower rise for months now, a very careful construction project because it is at least fifty feet tall, maybe more, a fluted column with other motifs on its white surface.

“Oh, it’s a minaret,” our friend said without missing a beat.  Of course I thought makes perfect sense.  “For call to prayer,” she continued.  “Which is beautiful if you’ve ever heard it.”

“Do you think that’s appropriate?” the stranger asked.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You know the first one is at five in the morning,” he said.  “I just wonder what the neighborhood around here will think.”

I turned around and from where we stood we could see three church steeples.  “Probably no more than they think of the bells ringing on those.”

“But not at five A.M.” he said.

I looked at him.  “What the problem?  Bells are okay but a muezzin isn’t?”

“Well, this is a christian community.”

“I live in this community and I’m not a christian.”

He looked at me oddly.

“Get a petition up to shut down the bells ringing,” our friend said, “and we’ll back a ban on call to prayer.”

“I just wonder if anybody was asked what they thought,” this guy said in a huff and started to walk off.

“Evidently,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have gotten a permit to build the damn thing in the first place.”

He didn’t answer, just stalked off.

It won’t surprise me in the coming months to have a canvasser show up at my door now with a petition to have hearings on whether Those People should be allowed to make noise in This Community.

What part of tolerance don’t folks understand?

Oh.  I forgot.  As long as it’s not where we can see or hear it, we’re as tolerant as anyone.

You can read Vidal’s article at Truthdig:

I don’t know how many of you were as appalled as I was at the way that the presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was totally erased from the last Democratic debate held in Iowa.  This was a decision that was made, I can tell, jointly by the one-time voice of AIPAC, Mr. Wolf Blitzer, and, at the same time, The Des Moines Register—or whatever it is called—a paper of no consequence for the United States of America.

Kucinich’s exclusion is infuriating, for the reasons discussed by Vidal. 

Warning:  The site discussed in this post might be a scam.  Check the comments before doing business with this site. 

I visited The Art of Mental Warfare tonight.  It presents itself as a “clarion call to action for an apathetic nation.”  The site is based on a book of the same name, by David Vincent.   The site offers the following quote by that well known Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

The themes of the site?

Corporate media, for starters.  How many corporations dominate US mainstream media?  It’s dwindling:

1983 = 50
1993= 14
2007 = 5

How much do we pay for public broadcasting?

Germany $85
UK $83
US $1.54

Hence, the battlecry:

The mainstream media is an elaborate and sophisticated propaganda apparatus that is designed and utilized to deceive, manipulate, dumb down, distract and marginalize the American public. We realize that the mainstream media is not giving us the vital information that we need to develop informed opinions and participate in this so-called “democracy.”

However, the average US citizen still does not understand this. They are too busy working hard trying to make ends meet, trying to provide for their families, trying to pay off their homes, credit cards and debt. They don’t have the time to spend hours everyday researching issues that the mainstream media doesn’t even mention or discuss.

In fact, with hundreds of television channels, radio stations, magazines, newspapers and movies, the average citizen thinks the amount of viewpoints in the media are overwhelming and diverse. They don’t realize that the vast majority of media companies are controlled by a handful of the world’s most powerful interrelated corporate interests. They don’t realize that over the past 25 years we have experienced a scandalous concentration in media ownership and an all out attack on public TV and radio.

Okay, perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. But I found some videos on YouTube purporting to show simple homemade tricks for getting power from essentially nothing. The culprit calls himself HouseholdHacker These are very slickly directed and composed, very amateur-looking videos, full of straight-faced monologue and how-to demonstrations, illustrating nothing real.

Sure, the videos seem to show how to power a 25″ TV from a single AAA battery, or an iPod from an onion. But I — as an individual who actually has a clue about how electricity works — am puzzled at the number of responders who actually try these things and wonder why they don’t work. I’m aghast at the apparent shills responding that they did try the techniques, and that they work!

Fume.

There is enough anti-science and anti-sense on the web from well-intentioned individuals. The rising tide of disinformation doesn’t need more heroes!

There is plenty of really bad advice for home chemistry procedures that only might injure someone (as opposed to certainly will). But these might be assumed to be attempts to recruit people for the Darwin Awards (perhaps a bit much for a practical joke). At least the works of HouseholdHacker will only produce annoyance and a few broken cables and small peripherals.

After all the Creation “Science” websites I view (bastions of misleading misquotes, side-stepping logic, and intentional anti-science), why pick on this source of disinformation? Because this guy appears to know what he’s doing, and appears to be showing his techniques working. Seeing is believing!

Point to discuss: Should we even discuss suppressing obviously intentional misinformation that is being widely broadcast? Is is bad that sources like Google might then (mis)inform curious innocent people?

First amendment freedom of expression? After all, if the bomb-designers and hate-provokers have the right to spread their joy, why not this relatively harmless disinformer?

What of the willful incitement to trivial destruction of property presented by HouseholdHacker on YouTube and at HouseholdHacker.com? Does inciting a few hundred gullible people to each ruin  less than $100 worth of stuff add up to a $10,000 crime?
Was it a good idea to link to the posts from this miscreant? (My guess is, “no”.)

Speculation: What is this guy’s game? Is there some hacker contest to dupe the maximum number of technical ignorati?

The story was published by the Washington Post:

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

For commentary see this post from Huffpo.

Here’s a heartwarming story  about some of the insanity that followed in the wake of 9/11.  We see this kind of thing all the time, in the news, on tv shows, in movies.  A mistake compounded into tragedy by the utter fear and panic induced under extreme conditions.  One could almost forgive the FBI for this given the circumstances, but the follow-up beggars understanding.

It’s not like this is rare.  In Myanmar, comedians get jailed for cracking wise about the government (I believe stand-up comedy is illegal there period).  In Cuba, it is fine to criticize the United States all you want, but if you point out that your own government (Castro’s) doesn’t exactly deliver what anyone might call freedom, you end up in jail or dead.  Threats to national security the world over are never treated as anything less than the active presence of the devil or Darth Vader.  (Of course, in most cases Darth Vader is the one in charge, so…)

We, however, have no excuse.  Now, the courts did let this man go.  But then they sought to eradicate the public statements of what really happened.  The coercion was seen as something we must not admit happened.

So what’s worse?  Embarrassment or a violation of individual rights?  Because that is what all this has in common.  Governments seeking at all costs to avoid being embarrassed.

You might think that this should be a no-brainer.  If you want not to be embarrassed, don’t do anything embarrassing–i.e. don’t do anything stupid.  But governing is a large, complex, messy endeavor, and those who govern, after all, are humans (usually) who are prone to all the failures of our organism.  Things that look like a “good idea at the time” can turn out very much badly.

And the truth is, we still depend on Face in international relations.  This is silly as well, but unfortunately very true.  The appearance of a dignified, competent national government carries weight in negotiations.  It also carries weight with the people being represented.  After all, who wants to grant power to a buffoon?

I think, however, this part of the Emperor’s wardrobe.  Nations tacitly accept that they must avoid embarrassment on the home front in order to be credible to the rest of the world, but is there any validity to the presumption?  Between individuals, the ability to admit mistakes and laugh at oneself is seen—usually—as a virtue.  Somehow, once we go up the ladder into the realms of government, that virtue becomes intolerable.

So the FBI gets the wrong address, busts in on a family in its bed, makes a mess of the home, and finds out later that this really wasn’t a safe house for drug dealers/terrorists/counterfeiters/kidnappers/what have you.  Would it destroy them to say “We’re sorry” and perhaps offer some compensation for the inconvenience?  Instead they adamantly behave as it a trick had been played on them and that the FBI is the victim.

This is supposed to be a democracy.  This is supposed to be where the government works for Us.  When someone I hire screws up a job, I do not apologize to them or tolerate the suggestion that it was my fault they did it wrong.  In fact, while I might be inclined to overlook the mistake in the first instance, such arrogance would get them summarily fired.

It might do for all of us–right or left, it doesn’t matter–to bear in mind one simple fact about our leaders.

They are employees.

The president of the United States is indeed the most powerful single national leader on the planet.  He (perhaps soon she) wields power and authority unlike no king in history.  The burden and complexity of the office are crushing and we have seen men go in fairly vigorous and come out white-haired and, sometimes, broken (Johnson comes to mind; the job arguably killed Roosevelt and both Wilson and Eisenhower were damaged in office); those who gain the office deserve respect and perhaps a little admiration.  But at the end of the day, they are not My Country—they are an employee.

And if that’s the case for the president, it is even more so for everyone else down the chain.

So if a government official does something stupid, well, let’s see about making sure that doesn’t happen again.  If, however, they then proceed to act as if I have no right to bring them up short for their mistakes, then it’s time to fire them.

Because all too often the consequences of trying to squelch the public exposure of an embarrassment are far worse than the initial mistake.  After all, this isn’t Myanmar.

Is it?