The chamber, flickering by massed candle light, is stuffy and just a bit noisy from all the shfting fabric and heavy breathing, muttered comments and borborigmi. The couple in the opulent bed seem annoyed, but they’re forcing themselves to play along and be jolly. He manages—he’s been through this before, of course—but she is having difficulty with the idea of being unclothed before an audience.

“We must do this quickly and have done,” says he, “then they will leave us to our bliss.”

She eyes him suspiciously, then nods curtly, hikes up what little she has around her hips, scoots down, and spreads her legs.

Ponderously, he rolls atop her.

A minister, a member of Parliament, two servants, and a Duke move closer to observe.

“A little to your left, Highness,” says the Duke.

Everything slides home. The woman winces visibly (it doesn’t really hurt, but there is the expectation of virgin ritual to fulfill).

“It is done,” the minister says, whereupon the Master of the Chamber begins shooing everyone out of the room to leave the newlyweds alone.

Macabre? Loosely, we’ve just witnessed the wedding night of Henry the VIII and…well, one of the six. It was a State Affair, the First Time, and required witnesses. The realm must be assured that the king’s thing shot home into the queen’s vagina. All is well, the security of the state is assured.

This obsession with where penises go—or whether they go somewhere at all—has, you may rightly agree, no place in a democracy where the provenance of royal spoor has no bearing on state matters (unless one is unfortunate enough to stain a dress with it). In Henry’s day, however, the royals had far less privacy in the matter than the commoners. You would think we’d have learned by now that, really, where what part fits when and with whom is totally irrelevant to anything, well, National…

Not so. California has legalized Gay Marriage and some of its citizens are Up In Arms about it. So much so that they are trying to enact an amendment to ban it. Of course, they’re a bit embarrassed about it as they are now suing to remove the current wording from their Proposition 8, which is one of the more truthful and straightforward such ballots I’ve seen. It states currently that by voting for Proposition 8, the right to marry and be married will be removed from homosexuals—who currently enjoy that right in California. The proponents of Prop 8 call the wording “inflammatory” and want it changed. The problem is, that is exactly what Prop 8 will do.

So why the fuss? Well, they’re afraid such wording will cause people to reject it. It’s too rough, you see.

Personally, though, I think they are also just a bit embarrassed, because underlying this desire to strip gays of the right to marry is this same old pesky problem of where all those penises are going. We can’t crowd into the bedrooms of all these folks—especially since it looks like domestic surveillance might be curtailed again under the next president and Alberto Gonzales is no longer in the Justice Department to make sure our search for terrorists can also be used eventually to root out, you know, perverts—so the next best thing is to try to make sure what Those People are doing is in no way protected by law.

A stretch? Well, take a look at this from Osron Scott Card. I pick on this because Card is an excellent fiction writer who seems to have the ability to empathize (in his fiction) with those he does not agree with. In fact, a read of his novel Songmaster would lead one to expect a profound level of tolerance for alternative perspectives. And yet, compartmentally, he seems incapable of extending such tolerance to, well, reality.

But it is his claim that such legalization of gay marriage is a threat to democracy that I think is interesting. This is another in the long conservative argument over Legislation from the Bench—which they hate when liberals do it, but then they do it themselves all the time in the guise of Strict Constructionism. So this would be great for them—enact a constitutional amendment which would bypass legislative bodies and allow a conservative court to strike down majority mandates based on constitutional law that can be construed as Founding Intent.

It is such a tortuous road, though, for such a silly prejudice. Do people really concern themselves with what other people do with their parts? Does it matter where someone else’s penis goes as long as such use conforms to laws that apply to everyone (statutory rape, forcible rape, etc)?

Maybe it is does. I know it concerns me where mine goes. But I always thought that was a strictly private matter. Maybe I’m wrong.

There is yet another story going around about dinosaur and human footprints found together in ancient (maybe 4,000 years old!) rock. Here is the local credulous Texas take on the find.

All the previous pictures of contemporaneous dinosaur and human footprints provided by these people showed that humans used to have 19″ long feet with only 3 toes. This new isolated sample, long removed from its secret setting, is available to view in person by true believers. The dinosaur track might be real, but any anatomist or gait specialist could tell you what is wrong with the human footprint, and its intersection with that of the dinosaur. Any paleontologist want to comment on the dino-print?

If they really wanted actual paleontologists to believe the evidence, they would invite them to the site of the find to seek the rest of the footprint trail. As an attempt to gain credulity, they claim that over 800 x-rays were taken of the rock (one CAT scan?) after the human footprint was “revealed”. Um, I guess they need to prove that it is a rock through and through. Actually, the claim is that fossil footprints are made by compressing layers of rock, rather than in a soft single sediment layer where they are usually found. The scans reportedly show that both footprints distorted underlying layers.

The daughter of the discoverer has studied some geology, so she is skeptical of its evidentiary value as proof of a Young Earth. But Dr. Carl Baugh, the founder and director of the Creation Evidence Museum in Texas, hopes to get these pictures into Texas textbooks (and therefore all other states) under the Strengths and Weaknesses doctrine of the Discovery Institute.

In case you’ve been out of touch, a student in Florida took Our Lord Jesus Christ hostage a few weeks ago. He walked out of church with a consecrated communion wafer to show to a friend, rather than promptly eating the true flesh of the 2000 year old man. Ignoring the question of whether Jesus really did say, “Eat Me”, this little event became big news. First, the college and the church denounced and eventually impeached the poor kid. Demands that he be expelled and/or excommunicated flew. (Orlando Sentinel summary article).

Then famous rationalist and biologist PZ Myers got into the act. He published a post in which he suggested that those incensed need to get a reality-based life: “It’s a frackin’ cracker” said he. Myers even suggested that someone should procure for him one of these blessed wafers, so that he could personally desecrate it.

Then the spam hit the fan. Thousands of comments and emails and demands for his expulsion and his firing and even death threats followed. Well, back and forth over several posts. One woman made international news for being fired for using a company computer to send her death threat.

Finally, Myers posted “The Great Desecration” beginning with “It is finished.” He discusses the way the church has used just the allegation of wafer misuse in history to spur mobs to mass murder (with specific examples). He posts a few of the more lucid (and publishable) denunciations of his proposed desecration, with commentary. And finally, he shows a picture of the desecration itself. Not only does he drive a rusty spike through the cracker (wondering in print if Jesus has a current tetanus shot), he nails it through the Koran and into one of Dawkins’ books, then artistically covered it all with the traditional banana peels and coffee grounds.

Desecrating the Koran was a suggestion made by many of his Catholic detractors, who suggested that he didn’t dare offend the Muslims, but only picks on Catholics (the group from whom he received the most death threats) because they are so kind and forgiving.

Desecrating Dawkins is to point out that he is not selectively suggesting that the Biblical injunction against worshipping images be used only against Judeo Christian churches. But that all icons be examined from the point of view that the symbol is not actually the object. Or to quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing”.

We like to believe, as Americans, that this country is a meritocracy. The idea—Horatio Alger, Thomas Edison, McGuyver, all emblematic of this notion—that the best qualified rise to the top, that those who can display and apply ability, skill, and intelligence are the ones who are selected—either by themselves or through the recognition of society—to do important jobs and that this, as opposed to elitist canards like family or school affiliation or looks or race, counts for more in this society. We like to believe that we judge people by their competence, not other things. It’s a driving national myth.

We like to tell ourselves that such people are Heroes.

Like most myths, there’s an element of truth to it. It is certainly the case that the opposite of such ability gets derided once exposed and the people who are less capable lose whatever consideration they’ve received. Eventually. Under the right circumstances.

But we all know that as a guiding ethic, merit is like anything else, and does not hold universal sway over our sentiment.

Perversely, many people display what can only be described as fear of people who are genuinely competent and talented, depending on the circumstances. All one need do is look at the condition of regard in which science is held by many people and the way professionals are often mistrusted and we’ve all seen instances where the person at the party who actually knows a thing or three—and dares express that knowledge—often as not ends up not invited back.

It’s a complex and contradictory attitude Americans have toward ability. We admire and respect it—until it contradicts a long-held belief or runs afoul a prejudice or makes us feel, in ourselves, a bit stupid.

It is probably more cloyingly and illogically represented in our general attitudes toward race.

Let me put it as bluntly as possible—in American history, how often has genuine merit been rewarded if the potential recipient is not white? Or male?

This is largely rhetorical. Most people very well know the answer—seldom, and often when such a person does stand out, attempts are made to diminish his or her achievements. We have been persistently whittling away at this problem for a long time now and we may be forgiven if from time to time we seem to feel it has been solved. It takes a shock to remind us how far we have yet to go.

In fact, part of the aftershock ought to be a recognition that this is a problem somehow wired into human nature, and that if we solve it for one group, it will simply move to another.

What kind of shock am I talking about?

Let me point you to this from John Scalzi’s Whatever. Go read it, then come on back here.

A couple of things I note—one, the reporter in question is herself clearly a minority. So one wonders why she would be duped into reporting this in this way without being outraged. The other is, the unattributed assertions made in the report.

But the main problem goes back to the merit argument.

These two people—Barack and Michelle Obama—are representative of our mythical Competent People ideal. They’ve Done It. They are deserving of our respect for their achievements and therefore deserve to be considered on their abilities.

However.

They seem to be of the wrong group. Hmm. How did that happen?

Wrong group? Do we still think that way?

Well, you know, maybe not, but we have this other national ideal that tends to undermine the first one, and that is Winning Is Everything. We talk about fair play and sportsmanship and all that, but we don’t believe in it, not when the possibility of losing is in the mix, and this is a presidential race. In politics, all the stops get pulled out, and if one of the weapons is to be race, well, then, perhaps the engineers of such tactics are not themselves blatant racists, but they have no qualms about using discredited tactics in the all-important attempt to win, merit aside.

Because you really don’t see people very often graciously stand aside for the better qualified. It would be nice if you did, it would say so much to the next generation about what is important. But we’ve debased that coin for 200 + years.

Equally important, though, is the question of why those who put this out there would believe it would have any impact.

Because it will. Because a lot of Americans, though they might never say it, still fear the ramifications of such a possibility.

Which is why I will believe no poll this year. I believe people will be ashamed to admit their prejudices and tell pollsters that they will support Obama, but once they’re inside the voting booth will stop and ask themselves if they’re really ready to see a black man as president.

Unfortunately, this is America. We may surprise ourselves. Or we may see the upcoming election one in which the next president is the one who simply lost least.

Joanna Russ, a teacher and science fiction writer and savvy thinker, published a book in 1983 called How To Suppress Women’s Writing. It is a lucid textbook on cultural oppression. The subjects are women and writing, but the methods and tendencies she lays out apply to virtually any sub-group and occupation. It is worth finding and reading. It delineates the subtle—and not-so-subtle—ways in which we as a culture steal merit from those we don’t wish to see possess it. In the prologue, she writes:

In a nominally egalitarian society, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But, alas, give them the least reall freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong” people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

Some will do it well, and then you see the tactics of disenfranchisement take a few steps up the scale of panic and ugliness. Never mind that Hank Aaron actually broke Babe Ruth’s record, he’s black, and shouldn’t have been able to, but since he was about to anyway he had to be prevented. Death threats ensued. Washington Carver was a brilliant chemist, certainly, but look what he did! All his research was based on, well, peanuts. What can one expect from a black man? (It wasn’t, but even so, the denigration ignores the achievement.) Frank Yerby was a brilliant novelist, but he was fluke, the exception that proved the rule that blacks couldn’t write anything other than about themselves. He moved to Spain finally to get away from the racist belittlement of his work.

The list goes on and on. Add now this absurd, obscene attempt to paint Michelle Obama as exactly the same as every white bigot’s worst fear of a welfare queen sitting in the White House.

Merit is ignored. Ignored long enough and thoroughly enough, and it cannot shine through.

At least, so such purveyors of intolerance wish.

It might not work this time. If it doesn’t, it would be nice to think that, for a change, merit counts for more. But it may also be that further attempts like this will trigger another American ideal, that being our almost reflexive sympathy with so-called underdogs. If that puts Obama in the White House, well, goody for us. But it would also be success that ignores merit. It will be a serendipitous achievement based on our national dislike of bullies.

What then will be learned from it all?

If we were, as we would like to believe, concerned with ability and competence above all, then it is inconceivable that George W. Bush could have been elected, even in the first place. Both his opponents are by any measure his superiors in ability.

The truth is, we value comfort more and Bush, in his own way, is comforting to many people. He’s not our better. He’s “just like us” in presentation and, sadly, ability. He doesn’t make us feel inferior (by now, probably, quite the opposite) and he doesn’t challenge us to rise above mediocrity. With Bush you could share a beer and talk about baseball. With Obama? In truth, you probably could, but more likely if the subject moved on to something real—like taxes or foreign policy—most of us likely couldn’t keep up. He understands these things in a way that most of us don’t.

Not because we can’t. Because we have neither the time or patience to really understand them.

How can I say that?

Well, the evidence. If we did understand such things, we wouldn’t have had to put up with Bush for eight years.

And we wouldn’t be afraid of Obama.

Today we biked over to see the 2½ hour long gay pride parade. “You’re here, you’re queer, we’re used to it.” About 40,000 other people came to see the parade along the edge of my neighborhood today.

You can see the crowds looking down Grand Boulevard. Many people were festively dressed. There were many couples of every gender combination, and many pets and some children.

See Mayor Slay at the head of the Gay Pride parade, waving under a mural of Jesus on the Messiah Lutheran school.

Did you ever notice the yellow lilies in the median on Grand? Here, the throng standing on the southbound side watch the bees in the northbound lanes.

And it is no surprise to have a heavily cheered and well attended block of Obama supporters in this parade.

Yes, there were beads, beads, beads!

And the scattered showers failed to scatter the crowds:

Even unsheltered riders in the parade were undeterred by the rain:

And the rain passed, and a good time was had by all:

And after the parade, there were the stage shows and the booths. Food, drinks, finance, churches, travel, home improvement, wearables, and more.

It was a colorful day in one of our landmark parks, this 28^th annual Gay Pride Festival in Saint Louis, Missouri. On the eastern edge of this “red state”.

I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial should be taught in science classes.

I have read much by Pournelle, starting with his collaborations with Larry Niven in the 1970’s and ’80’s, and then his columns in Byte magazine, and his solo novels more recently. There is a strong Libertarian feel in his recent works (such as “High Justice”), where big corporations are the good guys and “liberal” governments merely stumbling blocks to progress or even survival. But he does write some great adventure stories. I was only mildly put off by the contention in “Fallen Angels” that embracing the global warming hoax would lead into international Luddism. I figured that it was just a plot device.

But now I see that the writings of Pournelle reflect an overall feeling that Nature and Man are but players on a stage that no mortal can understand. Perhaps it has something to do with his recurring close brushes with mortality. If you read some of his other columns at JerryPournelle.com, you’ll see that he champions all manner of oddball challenges to “Mainstream Consensus Science”. Sooner or later, one of these challenges may turn out to be valid. But historically speaking, successful challenges to the well established theories of thermodynamics and quantum theory are far between.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the government in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. This decision strikes down a key section of the Military Commissions Act, the horrible piece of legislation passed by Congress in October 2006 that sought to condemn detainees to indefinite imprisonment with no real right to challenge their detention.

The MCA provided only for “Combatant Status Review Tribunals”, a farce trial that makes a mockery of the protections given by the Constitution to an accused person. Detainees are tried before military officers, rather than neutral judges. In these tribunals, they have no right to a lawyer, they can be barred from seeing the evidence against them, and they cannot call witnesses in their defense. In a number of cases, when the first CSRT concluded an inmate was not an enemy combatant, the government simply ignored the ruling and convened a second one to reach the decision it preferred.

These inquisitorial, rigged “trials” give further evidence of why the writ of habeas corpus is so vitally important. For over 700 years, it’s protected people against arbitrary and capricious imprisonment by their government. By forcing the government to publicly show the reasons why it has detained someone before a neutral magistrate, habeas corpus turns imprisonment into a tool of justice, rather than a tool of tyranny.

The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress may suspend habeas corpus, but only in cases of “rebellion or invasion”, when it is vital to protect public safety. Clearly, neither of these conditions is in effect at the moment. Thus, the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus for detainees was unconstitutional, and the Court was absolutely in the right to strike it down.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been in detention, in some cases, for over six years without ever being given the chance to prove their innocence. The Bush administration’s attempt to put them into a legal black hole, beyond the reach of all law, is anathema to everything the American justice system stands for. It’s long overdue that this injustice was corrected. If any of these detainees are terrorists or have committed war crimes against the United States, then let the government prove that in a court of law. Our justice system has served us well against those who would harm us for over two hundred years, and it will continue to do so. On the other hand, if any of these detainees are innocent - a very likely circumstance, given the dragnet-like way in which they were swept up - then their detention is an outrageous evil, and they should immediately be released.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, concluded that neither the President nor Congress may “switch the Constitution on or off at will“. The Court rejected the legal fiction that, because Guantanamo Bay is technically part of Cuba, the detainees have no recourse under the U.S. Constitution.

This is a great victory for due process and for the American legal system, and a bright day for friends of liberty everywhere. The only dark spot on this decision is that it was by a narrow, 5-to-4 majority. (Scalia’s dissent begins “America is at war with radical Islamists” and goes on to cry about how the terrorists will kill us if we don’t lock people up indefinitely with no trial. I am not joking.) If John McCain is elected president and has the chance to make the next few appointments to the Supreme Court, the fragile constitutional bulwarks which still stand against arbitrary government power will be in extremely serious jeopardy.

In brief, Stephen Jay Gould proposed the idea that evolution is truly stochastic (a particular technical kind of random), that if we started evolution over as of a million years ago, we probably wouldn’t be here in our current form. That is, any evolutionary step is contingent on the history of steps that went before, each based on a combination of random mutation and environment.

I’ve read several posts about the new discovery today, and the best summary with accurate excerpts and clear analysis is this one from Pharyngula (PZ Meyers Myers).

In brief: A single experiment ran over 20 years, or 33,000 generations of bacterial cultures, where they froze a sample every 500 generations from each of 20 separate populations, all nurtured identically over the entire time with a particular set of stressful conditions. When a particular beneficial change occurred to the population, they could track back genetically and see what the genetic change was, and what probably allowed it to manifest in a visible way. Then they tried to get the same thing to happen again starting from various suspected branching points. In some cases, the same mutation happened again.

Of course, Michael Behe of the Discovery Institute quickly posted a sort of rebuttal to the idea that yet another piece of evolutionary theory has been proven, so Meyers took him to task. Behe claims that the experiment proves how incredibly unlikely such changes are, and therefore they need an Intelligent Designer to guide them. Apparently he missed the point that the complex series of changes did happen, and were repeatable, but only in a statistical manner. As opposed to in a pre-ordained, designed sort of way.

Or possibly his point is that God individually guides the evolution of laboratory E. Coli to fool scientists into thinking that supernatural intervention is unnecessary. It’s hard to tell.

[Admin note:  here is the description of the experiment by New Scientist]

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.

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!

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.

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…)

David Rees has it about right regarding Hillary’s dramatic public display of her overactive id.

Hillary Clinton is remarkable for her willingness to make her argument to elect her because, if Barack Obama is elected, he won’t be able to stay alive long enough to make it worth our while.

I’m about ready to start a public referendum to deport Hillary Clinton to some completely uncivilized place where she’ll fit in better.

Apparently the Pacific Justice Institute is suing a couple of Berkeley professors for putting up a website that explains evolution. The PJI apparently sues anyone who might constrain Christian evangelism in America, including in public schools. I read about this current suit here, on CitizenLink.org.

CitizenLink is a newsletter for Focus on the Family, a non-profit political action group for Pro-Life, evangelical Christian, and/or Young Earth education policies, but with redeeming social action programs. As long as they don’t mention candidates by name, they don’t have to pay taxes.

The legal claim is that evolution is a faith-based idea, and that the professors used Federal Grant money (National Science Foundation grant no. 0096613) as part of the funds needed to develop the site. Apparently the site disregards Creationist sources and ideology, and as such is religiously biased and violates the separation clause.

www.UnderstandingEvolution.com is full of references and citations, explanations, illustrations, and teaching guides to try to lead one to an understanding of many facets of what evolution is, and how it affects, well, everything. Topics include easy to follow answers for skeptics, like “How does evolution impact my life?”, “What is the evidence for evolution? ” and “What is the history of evolutionary theory?”. There are guides for teachers at all levels.

As such, this site has been a thorn in the side of Intelligent Design since 2004. Let’s see how much mainstream press this current nuisance suit attracts.

Last summer, I found myself dancing as an unpaid extra in a reality show. I’d been a dancing extra in a TV movie back in ‘98, and at least got lunch and minimum wage. This time I not only did it for free, but I had to sign a non-disclosure document. This time the show will have a wider audience than the (bad) movie that I was in before.

Why, you may well ask, do I mention it now? Well, that very show is finally being broadcast. The bit in which St. Louis Contradancers like myself will appear is just a couple of episodes away. It’s the CW’s iteration of “Farmer Wants a Wife” filmed just barely in the next county, near where the Missouri river joins the Mississippi. I say iteration because the show had already been a local reality show hit in 11 other countries before a U.S. company picked it up.

Now, I can’t say who was still standing in our episode. I don’t even remember. I don’t really care.

I am amused by the middle-of-nowhere pretension. Sure, it is in the flood plain, and out of sight of any big city. But it is also less than a half hour drive from major population and commercial support. The St. Charles airport that they flew into is about 15 minutes closer to the farm by bus than is Lambert International Airport. Lambert was the primary hub for TWA, before the industry crashed in 2001.

We were just there for a barn dance. It was fun. Cameras were everywhere, all the primaries wore wireless mikes, and camouflaged lighting kept things warm up in that depression era barn loft. Backstage has always had more appeal to me than the audience point of view.

But now I’m watching my first reality show. Sure, we record it and watch it when convenient. It is fun to see people on TV that we’ve met, in places where we’ve been. But now I have even more awareness of all the setup, production, and post production that goes in to making these 40 minute episodes.

We have a nice brewery run by the Schlafly family in our town. A town already renowned for beer. But a relative by marriage is more famous than the beer because of her stance against women’s rights and against progress through knowledge. Yes, Phyllis Schlafly is in the local news with a new controversy. In brief, this Washington University Alumna has been offered an honorary degree, and the faculty is in an uproar.

Why? After all, my own commencement speaker (honoree of the year) at that institution was Bob Hope. He claimed to be the most degreed high school dropout in the world at that time. The link above goes to the article containing the full text of a scathing letter by the faculty about the choice of Schlafly, specifically from the Law School. The flap is because the faculty thinks that honoring an outspoken anti-intellectual with another degree would demean an institution of learning. At least Bob Hope says silly things on purpose.

Our own Erich had put a response up there, but I found the post it by browsing news involving Creationism, another educational priority of Ms. Schlafly. Quoth he:

The problem is that if Ms. Schlafly completely had her way, core values of true academics, including skepticism and tolerance, would be extinguished. Under those conditions, Washington University would cease to exist.

According to this article, essentially copied from the AP, Adnan Oktar, who writes as Harun Yahya, has been convicted of fraud. His extensive organization has the goal to persuade the world (or at least the schools therein) of the Truth of Young Earth Creationism, as revealed in the Bible. In his case, he began by defending Islam against that Christian Evolution Conspiracy. But he also publishes books for the YEC Christian market in which he substitutes the return of Jesus for the coming of Mahdi.

I’ve read that he does produce beautiful books in support of his ideas. I expect him to get out on appeal of his apparently politically motivated incarceration. Then he and his followers around the world will continue to produce high class anti-science textbooks the like of which the Discovery Institute only wishes they could produce.

Arianna Huffington has just released her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. Huffington has reviewed the main themes of her book at Huffpo.

In the book, Huffington concludes that there are three main areas to consider in order to understand “how we got in the mess we’re in”:

A) the media;
B)  the role of fear in our politics; and
C) the failure of political leadership.

Huffington is a passionate and eloquent spokesperson for these critically important themes:

These three factors have combined to allow the lunatic fringe that has taken over the Right to hijack our country, our democracy, and our Constitution. So that 28 percent of the population that continues to support George W. Bush no matter how many bodies pile up in Iraq, how many jobs disappear overseas, how many For Sale signs go up on their block, or how high gas prices get, continues to dominate our politics.

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…)

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

Yall might could be tiring of my babbling on about Bible study in science classes. But I shall continue. According to this article, Louisiana has, and Florida still may pass amendments to their education codes to give free reign to teachers who choose to use texts other than (and conflicting with) science books to teach biology in science classes. Although these remarkably similar bills don’t actually mention the Bible, Creationism, nor their apparent origin from the Discovery Institute, their intent is clear.

I’ve been following this issue for a while (here’s one of my earlier posts), and continue to find it disturbing.

The main argument they make is that nothing is “proven” in science. Dedicated and well educated scholars have been trying diligently for over 200 years to disprove evolution. Yes, the battle predates the birth of Chas. Darwin! So far, no luck. Every piece of evidence and each new tool reinforces this theory. But with shrewd political action, the anti-science crowd could win enough popular support to hide the actual science from American kids. Theocracy, here we come!

If Pope Urban VIII (nee Cardinal Mafeo Barberini) had the political clout of American Fundamentalists, the Copernican/Galilean theory of heliocentrism might still be challenged in schools.

I have been anticipating the FCC switch from analog to digital for several years. The original plan was to have the final demise of NTSC (”analog”) broadcast in 2006. Now, it will really happen. The change that they averted when they went to color is finally here. Everyone needs a new TV.

Unless you have cable or satellite. Then you can wait until your old box dies. But I use rabbit ears in my multipath hell of a location in the city. On good days, I can get 7 channels of regular interest, plus 4 explicitly Christian channels (24, 26, 49, 51. The 700 Club shares 11). Sometimes I cannot get ABC-30 or CW-11 clear enough to record or avoid watering eyes. Other times Fox-2 and My-46 are too bad to watch, too. So I really only have 3 reliable channels in analog.

Enter digital clarity. Yesterday I got my gummint subsidized converter box and hooked it up. Now I get perfectly clear (in numerical order) Fox-2.1, CBS-4.1, NBC-5.1, local weather 5.2, and PBS 9.1-9.4. That’s it.

(more…)