Wednesday, August 31, 2005

TODAY, AUG. 31, 2005

This entry looks familiar. Since I work a month ahead on my blog entries, sometimes I can't recall if an entry has been used before. Though I have an organizational system, sometimes something will slip through under the wire. The whale song entry at the end seems most familiar.


TODAY

Today is Friday, July 29, 2005 and Iraq drags on. It's a fiasco and we're not going to see a democracy come out of there at all. Women will be oppressed, and it'll soon be a terrorist training ground of the first caliber because no one is going to control the religious teachers there anymore than religious teachers are controlled in Saudi Arabia. Bush's folly has made America and the world less safe rather than more safe. I cannot imagine the American citizens living right after WWII allowing this to go on. Those folks would have had Bush's popularity ratings down to twenty or thirty percent by now. America is no longer a peace loving nation which the world can look up to and follow. Two Texas politicians have destroyed everything that America once stood for, LBJ and GWB.


SOLDIERS SULLIED BY PURPOSELESS WAR. . . AGAIN

NEWSWEEK'S Baghdad bureau chief comes home after two years in Iraq and he's got some more sobering news:

"Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone's [the most protected enclave for foreigners in Baghdad] check-points. They've repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers—to Americans and Iraqis alike. Not that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have much to smile about. They're overworked, much ignored on the home front and widely despised in Iraq, with little to look forward to but the distant end of their tours—and in most cases, another tour soon to follow. Many are reservists who, when they get home, often face the wreckage of careers and family." (Newsweek, June 13, 2005, p. 40)

I'm 67 and I can tell you that all this sounds very much like Vietnam. And this is the modern condition of America and many western and westernized nations. Politicians can no longer fight and win wars which citizens are not convinced are actually necessary. That's why, historically, America always allowed itself to take the first blow.


MEXICAN IMMIGRATION BIGGER THAN ANYTHING EVER!

"Being brutally candid means recognizing that the huge and largely uncontrolled inflow of unskilled Latino workers into the United States is increasingly sabotaging the assimilation process. . . What's particularly disturbing about the Borjas-Katz study is that children of Mexican immigrants don't advance quickly." (Samuelson's column in Newsweek, June 13, 2005)

This slowness of the first generation of Mexican immigrant children to advance runs counter to the history of all the other immigrant groups who have come to America. Rather than blame that slowness on anything having to do with being a Mexican, perhaps we better be getting the word out to the rest of the world that America is no longer the vibrant economy which can lift up hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving endlessly on our shores. Maybe blue collar Americans need to look closely at what's happening to them too. Maybe we ought to be looking at what happened to Britain in the last fifty years.


HOW ABOUT A LITTLE SONG TO MAKE OURSELVES FEEL BETTER?
A WHALE OF A TALE SUNG BY A MEISTERSINGER

"The sea is murky. Sight and smell, which work well for mammals on the land, are not of much use in the depths of the ocean. Those ancestors of the whales who relied on these senses to locate a mate or a baby or a predator did not leave many offspring. So another method was perfected by evolution; it works superbly well and is central to any understanding of the whales: the sense of sound. Some whale sounds are called songs, but we are still ignorant of their true nature and meaning. They range over a broad band of frequencies, down to well below the lowest sound the human ear can detect. A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hour. Often it is repeated, identically, beat for beat, measure for measure, note for note. Occasionally a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst of a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Whales are very good at remembering. More often, on their return, the vocalizations have changed. New songs appear on the cetacean hit parade.

"Very often the members of the group will sing the same song together. By some mutual consensus, some collaborative song writing, the piece changes month by month, slowly and predictably. These vocalizations are complex. If the songs of the humpback whale are enunciated as a tonal language, the total information content, the number of bits of information in such songs, is some 10 [to the sixth power] bits, about the same as the information content of the Iliad or the Odyssey. We do not know what whales or their cousins the dolphins have to talk or sing about. They have no manipulative organs, they make no engineering constructs, but they are social creatures. They hunt, swim, fish, browse, frolic, mate, play, run from predators. There may be a great deal to talk about." —Carl Sagan in COSMOS, p. 271
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"Woe unto you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep." —Jesus Christ, according to Luke (Ah, yes, a man who understands my enemies. If only it were true, but the threat flows from the philosophy of the loser.)

Monday, August 29, 2005

ABOVE ALL WE NEED UNITY!!!!

This book I'm finally finished reading, edited in 1992 by William Shore, MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, is full of wonderful essays which help me to understand just a little bit better the nature of physics and biology or evolutionary psychology. I've even come across an essay on "string theory" from which I've selected the snippet which appears below. It's a little ditty about the struggle to come up with that single theory which unifies all the forces which control the Universe.

The only problem is that another of the essays in MYSTERIES says that we'll never be able to proof that final single theory because it will be as big as the whole Universe and no experiment can be all-encompassing enough to achieve the necessary proof. I came across that same idea in the "Great Course" course on Astronomy I just finished viewing. I can still see the googly [invented adjective here] smile that Alex Filipenko gives when he announces some seemingly unsolvable problem or hypothetical idea as yet unproven. He was a pleasure to watch over the 50 hour length of the two courses I watched. I thank my neighbor Chuck for lending me the DVDs.

But back to the snippet of essay. And here it is!

[Open quote] At present there are two physical frameworks that have partially explained the mysterious features of these four fundamental forces [gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force]. Remarkably, these two formalisms, the quantum theory and general relativity, allow us to explain the sum total of all physical knowledge at the fundamental level. Without exception.

All the laws of physics and chemistry, which can fill entire libraries with technical journals and books, can in principle be derived from these two fundamental theories—making these the most successful physical theories of all time, withstanding the test of thousands of experiments and challenges.

Ironically, these two fundamental frameworks are diametrically opposed to each other. The quantum theory, for example, is the theory of the microcosm, with unparalleled success at describing the subatomic world. The theory of relativity, by contrast, is a theory of the macrocosmic world, the world of galaxies, superclusters, black holes, and Creation itself.

The quantum theory explains three of the four forces (the weak and strong nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force) by postulating the exchange of tiny packets of energy, called quanta. When a flashlight is turned on, for example, it emits trillions upon trillions of photons, or quanta, of light. Lasers, radar waves, and microwaves all can be described by postulating that they are caused by the movement of these tiny quanta of energy. Likewise, the weak force is governed by the exchange of subatomic particles called W-bosons. The strong nuclear force, in turn, binds protons together by the exchange of gluons.

However, the quantum theory stands in sharp contrast to Einstein's general theory of relativity, which postulates an entirely different physical picture to explain the force of gravity.

Imagine, for the moment, dropping a heavy shotput on a large bedspread. The shotput will, of course, sink deeply into the bedspread. Now imagine shooting a small marble across the bed. Since the bed is warped, the marble will execute a curved path. However, for a person viewing the marble from a great distance, it will appear that the shotput is exerting an invisible "force" on the marble, forcing it to move in a curved path. In other words, we can now replace the clumsy concept of a "force" with the more elegant concept of a bending of space itself. We now have an entirely new definition of this "force." It is nothing but the byproduct of the warping of space.

In the same way that a marble moves on a curved bedspread, the Earth moves around the Sun in a curved path, because space-time itself is curved. In this new picture, gravity is not a "force" but a byproduct of the warping of space-time. In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

[I'm not scientist, and I'm sure that someone has thought of this, but if gravity is not a force like the other three, then perhaps they can't be unified and another approach to the whole picture must first be imagined which puts gravity into another category altogether. Now that I just reread this whole entry, I see that science already realizes what I just said, but I'll let my stupidity stand because, through it, I just clarified for myself what the problem is. Imagine that!? Now, of course, with my faltering short term memory, I'll forget this understanding and go back to not understanding the problem.]

However, the problem that has stubbornly resisted solution for fifty years is that these two frameworks do not resemble each other in any way. The quantum theory reduces "forces" to the exchange of discrete packets of energy, or quanta, while Einstein's theory of gravity, by contrast, explains the cosmic forces holding the galaxies together by postulating the smooth deformation of the fabric of space-time. This is the root of the problem, that the quantum theory and general relativity have two different physical pictures (packets of energy versus smooth space-time continua) and different mathematics to describe them. This sad state of affairs can be compared to Mother Nature having two hands, neither of which communicates with the other. [Close quote]


THE WEST IS ALL A SHOW IN THE BUSH

Mayor West of the fair city of Spokane is another perfect example of how more simple Christians can be fooled by liars and by deceit because they are raised in a religious culture which encourages deceit and dissembling. In a church culture where appearances are everything, good, well-polished surfaces naturally abound. And surface deceit gets rewarded too with offices and honors. One can learn to be an excellent dissembler in an atmosphere which encourages deceit, nay, demands it. And if one voluntarily remains in an atmosphere which encourages deceit, he/she must not be one of those who is the best judge of character or truth or they'd be, as they say, "outta there!".

So in our churches we can see, polished to perfection, the animal-based trait of lying. Lying, of course, is part of our inheritance for survival. Can the meek animal look most fierce? Can this insect look like a twig and this other one a leaf? Which swimmer can best look like a rock? In animal conflict, it's almost always all show. The combatant who puts on the fiercest show can win the dame without the actual combat. In humans the art of lying has brought in language as well as appearance to the task of lying. We're all liars, a little bit, but the Bush and West supporters remain so loyal because in the churches which they find so important, the surface is everything. The lie evolves in a perfect catalyst.
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"My uncle was the town drunk [pause] and we lived in Chicago." —George Gobel

Friday, August 26, 2005

CURRENT AGE: COLLISION OF DYING WORLD MYTHOLOGIES

Joseph Campbell published this in 1972 and gave the speech from which it was produced even before that time, but think of fundamentalistic religions in conflict now (2005)—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All dying together, they make the world unsafe for those of us with the non-religious religions of the future, the rational ones which, with love, live in awe of the natural world.

"Nietzsche, nearly a century ago, already named our period the Age of Comparisons. There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here. ("Judge not, that you may not be judged!") What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mIstakes." (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 263)


HITLER AND BUSH COMPARED

I don't want to go overboard here, and I'm not calling Bush a fascist, but I am making a personality comparison between Bush and Hitler which is quite revealing, if you ask me. I've been watching a lot of public TV recently, specially all those late night world war two documentaries. And I don't know how many times I've listened to descriptions of Hitler as a man who would not listen to advice and who spoke of tests of will and who wouldn't admit he was wrong and who refused to let his generals run the war because he thought he had all the answers. He was, at the end, a man who was completely out of touch with reality. Now that stubbornness is exactly what Bushites credit Bush for, his blind will to aim toward a goal no matter how wrong it might be or how destructive of all those around him. His inability to change direction or admit he is wrong about anything remind me of what I read and hear about Hitler. Stalin too, for that matter. I don't know how much Hitler drank, but I do recognize the traits of a dry drunk in Bush and traces of megalomania too for, anyone who is so vain as to think he knows or is doing a god's will is certainly a bit above himself.


YOU CAN'T KEEP THE BRIGHT ONES DUMB AND DOWN FOREVER

The following is an interview with a trouble maker from Texas. This young woman is definitely not Laura or Barb Bush material. She's actually got some brains which she uses for something other than keeping her ears apart.

[Open quote] At 15, Shelby Knox, a Southern Baptist girl from Lubbock Texas, donned a promise ring as a symbol of sexual purity until marriage. Living in a county where I in 23 female teens becomes pregnant, she then spent the next two years fighting the school board in an effort to replace an abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum with a comprehensive one, teaching contraception. "The Education of Shelby Knox", a Sundance award-winner tracing her transformation, airs June 21 on PBS's P.O.V. Now 18, Knox is a rising junior at the University of Texas-Austin.

What's wrong with abstinence-only sex ed?

Abstinence is the only 100 percent effective way to prevent STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and pregnancy. The problem is when kids who take abstinence pledges break their pledge, they don't have much [sex] education. So those pledges are really very dangerous.

What was your school sex ed like?

Ed Ainsworth [pastor and local leader of a Christian abstinence program] comes in your seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade year and before the junior and senior prom and tells you condoms don't work, and if you have sex your life is over. We also have health classes where we're shown advanced stages of sexually transmitted disease but aren't told how they can be prevented or cured. It's all scare tactics.

Why so much controversy over sex ed?

A lot of parents think, "If my kid goes to church, they're not having sex." In reality, a lot of kids have sex in junior high and high school.

Do you still wear your promise ring?

Are you asking me if I've had sex yet?

No.

Well, I have not, but that is because I have not found the person I want to have sex with. It's not that I won't wait until marriage, I just don't know.

And your ring?

The ring got stolen. If I still had it, I would not wear it.

Did you face fallout for your activism?

A Spanish teacher called me a baby killer—evidently abortion and sex education are synonymous in her mind. The school board wrote my principal saying I was causing problems. And once someone broke my windows on my car at school. People at my church told me I was on the path to hell.

What did you say to them?

Thanks very much for your input, but I think I'll let God decide. [Close quote]

Interview by Caroline Hsu
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"We had a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child... eventually." —Steven Wright

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

BUSH-LEAGUED ONCE AGAIN

" ' We'll get through this,' Daley (one stem cell researcher) says. 'But it's terribly frustrating having to move at a crawl when the science is so exciting—and when other nations are flying ahead.' In May, Daley learned with a pang that Korean scientists had discovered how to create patient-specific embryonic stem cells— exactly the kind of breakthrough work that he and Lensch [another researcher in the field] want to do in trying to understand genetic blood diseases. 'No disrespect to them,' Lensch says, 'but I couldn't help thinking that we could have done that.' He sighs. 'I really do think that we could've done that if we'd had the chance.' "

In an article in the recent TECHNOLOGY REVIEW (Sept. 2005) author Charles Mann details how Bush's ignorance and backwardness about stem cell research has allowed America to slip down the scale as a world class leader in science and technology. Not only has he put us behind Korean scientists, but Bush's brain drag is making stem cell research daily more expensive and is also creating a chaotic situation which makes the research potentially even more immoral (if morality is his goal).

Charles C. Mann's just published book is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus....


SPEAKING OF KILLER COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM

Yet again, someone comes up to me in a Safeway parking lot and hands me a flier asking me to attend a "benefit concert" for someone I don't know. Twenty-five dollars. The someone's a cancer patient named Ron. Frequently, too, I see these appeals in newspapers and at checkout stands in markets, coffee shops, on telephone polls, everywhere. Tied to this trend, I read in my local paper that 200 jobs are going to have to be cut down at the old whipping boy, the Mental Health Center, because of budget shortfalls. Screw 'em, their patients are only the mentally ill. How serious can that be?

If Bush and cronies get any more compassionate, we'll be watching people dying in our streets like in some African nations. Hey, reply the neocons and Bush, we need the money to keep bombing the bejesus out of those Iraqis, don't we? Why cure when a killing is near at hand? Just ask Haliburton.


PAT RUBBERTONGUE. WILL HE GET OUT OF THIS?

Maybe Pat's glib-tongued slip is why conservatives, Christians and Republicans can do to the poor, the middle class and the sick what they do do so well.

If one waits long enough, fundamentalists of all religions, Pope’s and all, always show their fascist roots. Know your history, and you’ll agree. Recently, Christian Protestant fundamentalist Pat Robertson showed his fascist roots when he called on our American government to assassinate Venezuela's elected president, Chavez, because Chavez has the nerve to think differently than Republican fundamentalists like Robertson. Chavez wants to establish free clinics for the poor of his country. Imagine that! Evidently Pat’s Bible-created paranoia (read the paranoid psalms) tells him that anyone who thinks differently than he does is an enemy who must be killed. Speaking of terrorists, Pat—it takes one to know one.
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"Either this wallpaper goes or I do." —Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)

[Or was that riposte the extent of librarian Laura Bush's most biting political comment to her husband? Speaking of libraries, our libraries are facing closures and more cuts because of Republican Tim Eyeman's (I-man/me generation) tax cut initiatives in Washington State. Hey, who needs libraries. People might get informed and then what'll happen?

Monday, August 22, 2005

REPUBLICAN LIES. . . . WHAT’S NEW?

This time the Republican liar is Bill Frist. There are so many of them, I’m having a hard time keeping them straight or remembering all of their lies. it’s getting simpler to say that if a Republican is speaking, he (or she) is lying.

Anyhow, during the heated time of the Schiavo debacle, Doctor Bill Frist, from the floor of the Senate after viewing a doctored videotape of Terri Schiavo, diagnosed her condition thusly, “. . . that footage, to me, depicted something very different than a persistent vegetative state.” Now that science, of course, in the form of an autopsy has shown that Frist was more interested in politics at the time of the Schiavo debate than in the facts, he claims, “I never made a diagnosis. I wouldn’t even attempt to make a diagnosis based on a videotape.” I can’t help remarking for the umpteenth time that the Republican base of religious rightists has been lied to all their lives about Jesus and god and all that nonsense that they can no longer distinguish when they’re being lied to, so the Republican leadership has no fear about lying to them. They’re naive and gullible and unable to distinguish the truth. Sad for America that there are so many of the innocent naive among us who will swallow any lie. Again, too, I want to mention what an important evolutionary adaptive quality is the ability to discern when one is being lied to. It brought the human animal very far on its journey to consciousness.


BROKEN FLOWERS BLOSSOMS

I’d put Jarmusch’s “Broken Flowers” right up there with the classic French film “400 Blows” for its complicated, ambiguous and thought provoking view of human nature. A truly grownup film for badly jaded American intellectuals.


THE PUBELICANS LIKE DISORDER

Why do Republicans like to deregulate industries? Why do they claim they want smaller government? Why are they not bothered by the chaotic conditions they’ve created for America’s work force and the hatred they’ve built up for America in the world? Why are they unconcerned about the huge deficits they’ve created for American which will hamstring any effort to make things better and fairer for the have nots in America? Why is America adrift right now with no clear purpose or any vision under which we can all unite? Why have we lost our way?

It’s because the rich don’t care, and the Republicans are undoubtedly the party of the rich. When things go crash, the rich are in a better position to survive while those of us, who live from paycheck to paycheck, can be ruined with a few bad months to deal with. So they can be careless with America’s future while the rest of us try to reign in their careless and cavalier way of treating American values and economy. I’m 67 years old, and I’ve never seen such a lying and careless bunch of Americans in public office since the South was a Democratic stronghold.

If you want to know the real trouble with America, let me let you in on a secret. It’s the South stupid! In the 60s and 70s, it was Southern Democrats who were giving America a bad name. Now, in the 90s and this decade, it’s still those Southerners, now as Republicans, who are holding us back from being a real, rational, progressive country again.


TAKING IT TO THE SOURCE OF ALL LIES

Speaking of the falsehood which Christians cannot see beneath and which makes them so gullible in all other areas of life:

Brian Flemming was once a Christian fundamentalist. Now he’s seen the light and has become an atheist. He’s created a documentary, “The God Who Wasn’t There” which gets to the root of the lack of evidence for the idea of Jesus Christ. Flemming, like so many of the realists among us, sees through the attempt of the fundamentalists to make America into a theocracy. Here’s what he has to say:

“The problem is that we let religious people say stunningly false things, and we consider it rude to question those beliefs. But we should be shunning those people.” If that sounds intolerant, that’s the point. Flemming says, “I’m not tolerant of suspending reason.”

The Flemming report comes from the pages of this week’s NEWSWEEK (June 27, 2005, p. 11)
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"I get my exercise being pallbearer for my friends who exercise." —Chauncey Depew [gallows humor?]

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

LOVE OR DEATH? GET PHYSICAL. STOP VIOLENCE

We can still call for it, but will we ever be able to handle it: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR!

"Mammals characteristically nuzzle, fondle, hug, caress, pet, groom and love their young, behavior essentially unknown among the reptiles. If it is really true that the R-complex and limbic systems live in an uneasy truce within our skulls and still partake of their ancient predilections, we might expect affectionate parental indulgence to encourage our mammalian natures, and the absence of physical affection to prod reptilian behavior. There is some evidence that this is the case. In laboratory experiments, Harry and Margaret Harlow found that monkeys raised in cages and physically isolated—even though they could see, hear and smell their simian fellows—developed a range of morose, withdrawn, self-destructive and otherwise abnormal characteristics. In humans the same is observed for children raised without physical affection—usually in institutions where they are clearly in great pain.

"The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop nonviolent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived—during at least one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence—of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life." —Carl Sagan, COSMOS, p. 331

How often have we heard these findings? Yet, now, physical punishment is being again encouraged as a way to alter children's behavior, and we still fear sexual expression as something bad and evil. How come we fail to see the connection between these findings and western history with all its violence and aggression, and, now, the history of Islamic nations which are even more oppressive toward women and children that we are, and more sexually oppressive? When you see that angry self-destroying terrorist face in your dreams, recognize the oppressive training behind it, specially the suppression of women and sexual display.


I ROBOT

"The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organized structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which form the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like one thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses. It is here that exchange of information occurs. Based on this information, it has been calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the number of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe. Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life—all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self—is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else." (A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V. S. Ramachandran, pp. 2-3)

Read that carefully and understand what he says. We are robots, and that we can still imagine we are more, is a very strange case, indeed. For some, I suppose, to cling to ancient, imaginary mental states is the only way they can cling to sanity.


I IMAGINE IT, AND THEY BRING ME THE PROOF

As I watch the religious right set out to destroy Public Broadcasting, limit science, undermine public schools and to, just, in general, dumb down the American populace to a sort of Bible-belt, Southern small town mentality, I picture that they want to make everything suitable for children because that's the level their own mentality best functions at. They want a childish American naiveté because that is easier to control than sophisticated modern people. No sooner do I write this thought in my imagination, then along comes Illinois Republican Governor Rod Blagojevich: when asked if he watches the Simpsons, he said, "I don't watch it. Because there's too much adult content." Well, if he doesn't want adult content, doesn't he admit he wants childish content? He said it. I only imagined he'd say it.

Rod's retarded rant found in U.S. WORLD AND NEWS REPORT, June 20, 2005

Monday, August 15, 2005

HYPATIA, ANOTHER MARTYR TO CHRISTIAN FEAR OF TRUTH

"The last scientist who worked in the Library [in Alexandria] was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy—an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370. At a time when women had few options and were treated as property, Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage. The Alexandria of Hypatia's time—by then long under Roman rule—was a city under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.

"The glory of the Alexandrian Library is a dim memory. Its last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia's death. It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. . . ." —Carl Sagan, COSMOS, pp. 335-336

Add this lady to Copernicus and Galileo and hundreds of thousands of other unknowns, intelligent and logical, whose intelligence has always been a threat to the rule of the ignorant and superstitious among us in the Christian church or in any church of any religion in history.


SCIENCE AND TRUTH OR SUPERSTITION AND IGNORANCE?

"Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine," wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfwaY across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times—a Cosmos of quasars and quarks. snowflakes and fireflies, where there [are] black holes and may be other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.

"Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Theophrastus was right. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

"There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must he discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge' is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them." —Carl Sagan, COSMOS, pp. 332-333


MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

My wife and I went to see the movie "March of the Penguins" the other night. A beautifully filmed, awesome film which depicts one year in the life of the Emperor Penguins of the South Pole. In the middle of it, of their tale of survival, I thought of our human species and how we don't quite face such natural attacks on us. Then second thought made me realize members of ours species perish constantly in natural and man made disasters. Then I thought how our brains could free us from natural and man-made disasters if we would only think, think, think and cast aside the superstitions of religion and take full responsibility for our human destiny. Because we have evolved brains and foresight, we can do what no other animal has been able to do, defeat nature and natural disasters. I fear we are still a long way away from being that humanly free. It's a race to see whether we destroy ourselves before we reach nirvana. With so many religious amongst us who secretly wish to escape life into imaginary heavens, the race to survive will be nip and tuck. Their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom are humankind's worse nightmare.

Friday, August 12, 2005

LAURA SCHLESSINGER FINALLY GETS WITH IT.
IF ONLY IT WERE TRUE

As some of you may know, I’m a Friend of the Spokane Public Library, sit on it’s board, and also volunteer a couple of shifts a month to selling used books in our little bookshop in the main branch downtown. While drifting around and looking over the books we had on sale today, imagine my surprise to see the title of one of Laura Schlessinger’s books which read, “HOW COULD YOU DO THAT: the Abdication of Character, Courage and Conscience.” Here, all along I thought she was the blind lapdog of the Bush administration, and now I see by the title of her book that she must be taking dead aim at the slimy Bush administration. I’ll have to read that book.


THE PLAME INVESTIGATION MUST BE GETTING TOO CLOSE

I read in this week’s NEWSWEEK (Aug. 15, 2005) that Deputy Attorney General General James Comey has accepted a job with Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor. Comey’s the man who Patrick Fitzgerald reports to. Fitzgerald is the attorney who’s investigating the Valerie Plame treason investigation, that is, who is trying to find out who was guilty of blowing an American agent’s cover. The probe has entered very closely into Carl Rove’s office with another inquiry being made about missing records of phone calls between TIME reporter Matt Cooper and Carl Rove.

Destroying records maybe, Mr. Rove?

So now we need to know who made a call to Lockheed Martin to suggest they hire James Comey away from his supervisory position over Patrick Fitzgerald so that a real Bushbaby can oversee Fitzgerald’s work. Boy, these guys in the Bush administration are real criminal scumbags.


BUSH AN ACCIDENT IN THE MAKING

In my long and varied work career in mostly blue collar America, I’ve come across several examples of gung ho, shoot from the hip, macho types who are very accident prone. One time, one of those types was playing with me and a couple of guys who were riding the bucket down from an oil field rig deck into the work boat below. He, manning the crane, in good fun, I suppose, let the ring drop a couple of feet, then hit the brake and brought us all to a jangling stop still about 60 feet above the boat deck. Ha. Ha. Great fun. I don’t mind if these types kill themselves, but I don’t like them playing fast and loose with my life. According to many reports from the Bush front, Bush rides his bike like one of those nonsensical, accident prone types and keeps having wrecks which hurt others and skin up his elbows and knees. Then, of course, we’ve got his Iraqi wildness, and, in that case, his accident prone foolishness is getting lots of other men killed. Somebody needs to get him a trike and confine him to peddling that around and take the reigns of the presidency out of his hands.


BUSH’S (NOT ROVE) BRAIN IS ALREADY
AS BADLY DAMAGED AS HIS ETHICS

The following is from a piece written for NEWSWEEK (Aug. 15, 2005, p.27) by Jonathan Alter.

[Open quote] When Bush was asked about intelligent design last week, he answered, "Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about." This sounds reasonable until you realize that, as the president's own science adviser,John H. Marburger III, admits, there is no real debate. "Intelligent design is not a scientific concept," Marburger told The New York Times, committing a bit of candor that will presumably earn him a trip to the White House woodshed. . . .

The most clever thing about intelligent design is that it doesn't sound like nonsense. It conjures up Cambridge, not Kansas. The name evokes Apple software, the MoMA gift shop or a Frank Gehry chair. The scholarly articles are often well written and provocative. But the science within these papers has been demolished over and over by other scientists. As Miller explains, science is perhaps the last true marketplace of ideas. After a decade in circulation, intelligent design has failed the market test. So now its backers are seeking the equivalent of a government bailout, by going around their scientific peers to Red State politicians trying to slip religious dogma into the classroom. [Close quote]
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"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root." —Thoreau [Yep! Impeach Bush! That's the answer.]

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

OKAY! AGAIN. . . THE BASEMENT BRAIN CHRISTIAN

Yes, I’m at it again, knocking the poor damn Christian who seems awfully afraid of me, my kind, and our knowledge, even though we are the smallest fragment of the American population. What do they fear that they would create a program on the Fox “misinformation” Network called, “Faith Under Fire”? Now just how much sense does that make unless they are truly pathological in their fear of science and it’s truths and atheism and it’s truths? For such a small number of individuals, we certainly cast a huge shadow on the fundamentalists’ minds, don’t we? In their paranoia, they project their own desire to stifle us onto those who oppose them. If it wasn’t so damned predictable and dangerous, I’d laugh at how clearly they represent the paranoiac mind.

So here we go again. We ask the question, “Since we now know from several independent sources that Bush mislead us into Iraq in order to enrich his friends at Haliburton and etcetera, how can he still be popular with his fundamentalist friends, his right wing Christian block of voters?”

Seems we need look no further than into the structure and function of the brain as expressed, this time, in Carl Sagan’s COSMOS to which I am finally coming to the end. Nothing new here, but constant repetition is the only way the truth gets through the neocon brain and the brains of its Christian supporters. Again, we find that the Christian is old fashioned, backward really, and less farther along in evolution than some of the rest of us. Zinger, eh?! Why do I say this?

Sagan speaks of the triune brain, the fact that the brain has evolved through time with the deeper parts being buried under the cerebral cortex, the civilized brain which has formed over and out of the more primitive bits of brain. And we also discover that “What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons.” (p. 278) Then Sagan points out that “Down in the basement [of the triune brain] are the functions our remote ancestors mainly depended on—aggression, child-rearing, fear, sex, the willingness to follow leaders blindly.” (p. 278) And right there you have it!

Fundamentalists, with their emphasis on family values (instinctive child rearing practices), aggressive warfare as a way to spread their beliefs, preoccupation with sexual matters, fear of everyone different from them, and their willingness to blindly follow George Bush demonstrate that they are still in the thrall of their more primitive brain functions. The rest of us certainly have the same values in some respects, but many of us have moderated our animal selves with more rational, higher brain functions.

The irony, I repeat again in this blog, is that the Christian right doesn’t see how they are still mightily influenced by the very evolution which they fear to accept. That is the way it has always been—those unable to face the unknown and the new will forever be dominated by them.

Here’s some more information about their dependence on primitive brain function. Talk about fear and aggressiveness, about stubbornly protecting your reptilian turf. In this week’s U.S. News and World Report (June 13, 2005, p. 14) we learn that even Bush’s own Republicans are “arguing that Bush is stubborn and arrogant. ‘His act is wearing thin,’ says a top-drawer GOP adviser. . . . It’s always I’m right. You’re wrong. Bush needs to respect other points of view, especially from those within his own party,’ says the adviser. ‘I don’t mind people having convictions, but there is another side to every argument.’ ”

And what are freedom-loving Americans to make of the aggressive animal stubbornness of Christian Republican Representative Sensenbrenner (or is that, Senselessbungler) who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and who angrily shut down his committee on Friday rather than listen to testimony which didn’t agree with his point of view on the Patriot Act?

Isn’t our Republic in danger when the party in power won’t even listen to the other side of a debate? But, hey, that’s the primitive brain at work. I tell you, these fundamentalist types (think of the criticisms of Bolton, another fundamentalist) are petty tyrants, and they are blinded by their religious training to any views but their my way or the highway brain shutdowns. If Sensenbrenner can act so repressively in public, imagine what they all must do out of the light of day to suppress freedom of speech and the free flow of information absolutely necessary to the functioning of a democracy? I don’t think they can be trusted with our freedoms.

Well, if Republican fundamentalists and neocons are in the thrall of their brain stems rather than their higher-functioning cerebral cortexes, what can be said of people with higher functioning brains? Edward Albee, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, in another U.S. News and World Report (June 13, 2005, p. 24) said, “Art is by nature political. It helps us to use our conscience fully. If you think more intelligently, you’ll vote more intelligently. I’ve known a lot of creative people, and none have been Republican.”
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“Anybody who thinks of going to bed before 12 o’clock is a scoundrel.” —Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) Does Johnson’s saw sing harmonious hums with that old saw from the 60s, “Never trust anyone over thirty!”? I liked the sound of that old saw until I turned thirty mese’f.

Monday, August 08, 2005

IDENTITY FRAGMENT

In the middle of the thoughts, feelings and actions which are me, there’s an integrity which could be identified as “me”, but that integrity is almost entirely a “body” identity and is based on survival instincts. I doubt there is much I argue about which isn’t identified with survival of my body. Language makes that drive, or drives, evident. Language makes the struggling me “visible” to others. All my survival instincts are being exposed by my language and projected by my language. Much language, however, is also only animal grunts of communication with a few syllables thrown in. But my real integral self is beyond language and probably always will be. So... conclusion? Identity is made up of fragmented moments of consciousness, held together by the life in the body. The central me which I could encounter in meditation is silence, probably Ingmar Bergman’s “god of silence”.


BEING CALLED A “CHRISTOPHOBE”

That’s a new word that fundamentalist Christians have come up with to attack those who oppose their drive to dominate American life, whereas, when I think it through clearly, I realize that I have little problem with the collected wisdom of earlier ages gathered together in the words and deeds of the Jesus myth as fictionalized in their Bible. Their myth of crucifixion and transcendence of death certainly expresses the deepest feelings that a human might feel when his evolving consciousness comes face ot face with his or her own mortality and the unfairness of being born only to die. Two-thousand years ago, with the little knowledge of reality that they had, their story of Jesus was probably an advancement over the actual human sacrifices that earlier religions required.

No, I’m not a Christophobe, but I do fear and oppose the Christian fundamentalist’s drive to force their Bible myths on all of us. Let me get what I want out of their myth and leave the rest, but I do oppose their censorship of good adult movies and the facts of evolution which they just don’t seem to be well-informed enough to understand. I do oppose their wish to take us back to a reality which is thousands of years behind the knowledge we currently have. Under fundamentalist leadership, we have already lost the leadership of the free world and gained the contempt of those nations where reason prevails over myth and superstition, and we’ve fallen behind South Korea in science.


JEEZ, LOUISE

For some reason, probably because I was watching a tall young woman with a nice figure here at Starbuck’s on Hamilton and wondering just how young she really was, an old phrase came into my head, the sort of vulgarism that teens like me in the Fifties used to mouth. Put your hands over your ears and eyes. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher!”?

Why, then, was I so shocked in my late thirties when that Cajun on the Louisiana oil rig, working side by side with me, spoke of “cutting” his woman when he referred to sex? Like in “I cut her on the back seat of the car, then I cut her on the kitchen table when we got into my apartment. Man, she likes it!”


SPEAKING OF WOMEN AND MENTAL HEALTH

Robyn Dawes in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 186, remarked how an unintended consequence of seeing women as being losers in the culture wars also allowed us to think of them as victims and, therefore, as having mental health problems which men didn’t have and therefore to be inferior to men.

“The problem is that feeling and believing that one is a victim and hence incompetent can inhibit action.... An erroneous belief that past abuse necessarily has lasting effects can... lead to drift and a worsening of the current lives of those who believe they were abused in the past.” —Dawes

Such beliefs can inhibit action to improve one’s lot in life, and that’s a terrific bit of damage because one of the things which most insures an improvement in one’s condition is the knowledge that one has taken steps to improve one’s life.
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“A friend in need is a friend to dodge.” —unknown

Friday, August 05, 2005

BELIEF IN GOD HAS A PROVEN PLACEBO EFFECT WHICH MIMICS A MORPHINE HIGH

Placebo is from the Latin meaning “I shall please.” What a wonderful saying! Imagine “I shall please” being a part of the words of the Christ of the fundamentalist believer!

New studies in the placebo effect show that “belief and expectation—the key elements of hope—can block pain [and depression] by releasing the brain’s endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine....” (TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, June/2005, pp. 79-80)

Yep, that’s right—if people put their hopes (i.e. beliefs and expectations) in some miraculous event, they will get a morphine high. The study, though not meant to demonstrate why religion is addictive, reveals why it’s so hard to get people to give up the placebo effect created by god myths; their beliefs create morphine highs in believers. Belief in god is an addiction which most people don’t even know they have, let alone want to give up. This is also why people addicted to their morphine based, religious highs will kill others rather than allow their supply to be taken away from them or threatened. This is why the clash of beliefs have been so destructive throughout history. They’re battles between addictive groups.

In alcoholics anonymous, there is an idea that the chronic alcoholic puts everything in his life below his need to use his drug. Alcohol is his chief love affair and comes first in his life. Wife, children, comfort, money, success—all are sacrificed to the alcoholic’s love of his drug. The same can be said for many believers’ addiction to the Jesus placebo which, we can clearly prove now, is akin to a morphine high. I’d say the facts are in. The mythology of Jesus, itself, tells its followers that they must abandon all things, abandon one’s family to follow the morphine high the Jesus myth offers to them.


THE ONLY UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE WHICH CAN BE UNDERSTOOD BY ALL

“We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere. The patterns in the spectra of distant stars and galaxies are the same as those for the Sun or for appropriate laboratory experiments: not only do the same chemical elements exist everywhere in the universe, but also the same laws of quantum mechanics that govern the absorption and emission of radiation by atoms apply everywhere as well. Distant galaxies revolving about one another follow the same laws of gravitational physics as govern the motion of an apple falling to Earth, or Voyager on its way to the stars. The patterns of Nature are everywhere the same. An interstellar message, intended to be understood by an emerging civilization should be easy to decode.” —Carl Sagan, COSMOS, p. 296.


HUMAN PROJECTION

In Cosmos (p. 109), Sagan reveals how humans with any knowledge they currently possess can easily project that consciousness out into the world and even into the Cosmos.

"Despite Wallace's critique, despite the fact that other astronomers with telescopes and observing sites as good as Lowell's [he popularized the idea of canals on Mars] could find no sign of the fabled canals, Lowell's vision of Mars gained popular acceptance. It had a mythic quality as old as Genesis. Part of its appeal was the fact that the nineteenth century was an age of engineering marvels, including the construction of enormous canals: the Suez Canal, completed in 1869; the Corinth Canal, in 1893; the Panama Canal, in 1914; and, closer to home, the Great Lake locks, the barge canals of upper New York State, and the irrigation canals of the American Southwest. If Europeans and Americans could perform such feats, why not Martians? Might there not be an even more elaborate effort by an older and wiser species, courageously battling the advance of desiccation on the red planet?

We have now sent reconnaissance satellites into orbit around Mars. The entire planet has been mapped. We have landed two automated laboratories on its surface. The mysteries of Mars have, if anything, deepened since Lowell's day. However, with pictures far more detailed than any view of Mars that Lowell could have glimpsed, we have found not a tributary of the vaunted canal network, not one lock. Lowell and Schiaparelli and others, doing visual observations under difficult seeing conditions, were misled—in part perhaps because of a predisposition to believe in life on Mars." —Sagan

Projection may actually be why humans needed god at one time. We evolved self-consciousness and, then, had to account for consciousness by projecting it into the Universe. So, also, we developed computers when our consciousness became more aware of it's biological and mechanical roots. And, as Sagan shows, we build canals, then one of us projects them onto Mars.


THE CLAYS OF LIFE

In Sagan's COSMOS (p. 126) we come across an idea which I also found in Dawkin's THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, that sands or other mineral patterns could have been the start of life. For myself, I still don't know that I am anything more than a collection of minerals so complex as to give the appearance of life even though I'm so mechanical I could almost be said to need oil (carbon) for my joints. Watch me and see if I give evidence of life.

"Even so, the results of Banin and Rishpon are of great biological importance because they show that in the absence of life there can be a kind of soil chemistry that does some of the same things life does. On the Earth before life, there may already have been chemical processes resembling respiration and photosynthesis cycling in the soil, perhaps to be incorporated by life once it arose. In addition, we know that montmorillonite clays are a potent catalyst for combining amino acids into longer chain molecules resembling proteins. The clays of the primitive Earth may have been the forge of life, and the chemistry of contemporary Mars may provide essential clues to the origin and early history of life on our planet."