GETTING SHORTER AND SHORTER
Now that I'm enrolled in an algebra class and may be in math courses for several quarters ahead, I must either cut back from three days a week or shorten my posts. I really "do" have to do all 100 exercises at the end of each section if I'm to keep up. I think, as my blog back log diminishes, I'll start making shorter entries but maintain the three times a week schedule (I almost wrote "tomes" as in three "tomes" a week).
MISHANDLING THE CHINA CHALLENGE
In a NEWSWEEK (Aug. 15, 2005) article titled, "Mishandling the China Challenge", Fareed Zakaria writes:
"China's growth strategy has been different from that of Japan. When Japan rose to power, it did so in a predatory fashion, pushing its products and investments in other countries but keeping its own market closed. China has done the opposite, opening itself up to foreign trade and investment. The result is that growth in countries from Brazil to Australia increasingly depends on the Chinese market. China is making itself indispensable to the world. Even India, which is wary of China's rise and is a counterweight to it, will not ignore this reality. In three years its largest trading partner will be China, displacing the United States of America.
"The Bush administration does not seem to know how to handle this new challenge. Donald Rumsfeld, fresh from wrecking U.S.-European relations over the last three years, has decided to try his hand at Asian affairs. He's off to a characteristically clumsy start. Rumsfeld made a speech in Singapore recently where he complained about China's rising military budget. It's a cause for concern, but Rumsfeld handled it crudely, producing a backlash."
Can you imagine this Bush regime which has made us enemies all around the globe handling anything with tact or in a way to make America safer or more secure? Now Bush has got Bolton in at the UN, and we know what that's going to lead to. Duck, Iran! You're next in line as bully boy Bush and his odds bodkins boys swashbuckle around the world like so many empire builders at the end of days, making things ever worse for America as she begins the inevitable decline which all super powers face. We need friends now, Bushyhead, not enemies. What an idiot.
SHIFTING THE BLAME
[Open quote] As the journal of theology Concilium wrote last year, the roots of Christian culture in Europe are tangled around some very ugly history, including centuries of religious wars and, more recently, the Holocaust: "Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology, the fact remains that European nations, East and West, colluded in the destruction of their Jewish citizenry." Given such history, it's not altogether surprising that, as Concilium put it, "Christianity is for most Europeans a part of Europe's distant past and not much more." [Close quote] —from an article by Christopher Dickey in NEWSWEEK, Aug. 15, 2005
Last time I looked, Hitler and Mussolini were both Christians and spoke often of Jesus and Christianity. I know us atheists have to take responsibility for Mao and Stalin, but let's not be shoving off the whole Second World War onto atheists. Besides, in these modern times, I'd say the worst troubles on this globe are caused by the most devout of religious men and women, Moslem, Christian and Jew. The rest of us learned something from the past, I guess.
ANOTHER OF MY LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
For a quarter century, America’s been careening toward “Republican religion”, and we should evaluate the results.
Are we still the most modern, forward-looking nation on the globe, the most financially sound, liberal-hearted nation ever? Is America still the world leader in science, on the cutting edge of scientific research? Is our educational system the best in the world? Are we turning out world class students, fitted for the technologically and scientifically challenging future? Is the gap between rich and poor shrinking? Is our middle-class increasing in numbers and in wealth? Are we still considered by the democratic nations of the world to be the most peace-loving power among them? Is America as widely respected as before?
Most importantly, after decades of increasing “born again” leadership, are we a united America, at peace with one another and sharing a common sense of American destiny? Are minority beliefs valued? Are we certain that government won’t meddle in our personal choices and religious affairs while working diligently to increase the common economic good?
No? Why? Look around the globe and observe that fanatical religious leadership generally impoverishes rather than enriches nations, and ask yourself, “Should religiosity be the business of our government?”
___________________________________________________
"What do I know about sex? I'm a married man." —Tom Clancy
Friday, September 30, 2005
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
THANKS TO BUSH
A not too distant Andrew Kohut survey of other nations on our globe, showed “U.S. status abroad waning”—so says the headline. Most nations now have a more favorable view of China than of the U.S. We are no longer the leader of the free world. Many nations fear us, but we’ve the lost the respect necessary to lead other nations. Bush just doesn’t have the values which free nations admire. In fact he’s more like an Islamic nation’s religious leader than an American president.
ARMIES HAVE TRADITIONALLY RAPED
AND PLUNDERED—SO?
According to a PBS report, a high proportion of women who join the military have been victims of sexual assault at some time in their lives. When we look at the history of rape at our military academies, we can see the problem being drawn in high profile. Think, also, of “Tailhook”, the Navy’s case of high level groping and rape. Why do American soldiers rape more than the average American male? Studies do show that soldiers are more into rape than others. Why, then, do women who have been rape victims put themselves into an organization where the power of males is supreme and where rape is more prevalent?
Here’s a case where it’s clear that those who have not done the necessary emotional work are almost unconsciously bound to set themselves up for more of the same.
BUSH’S REAL AGENDA
The real Bush agenda is to use the Christian right, not to advance their causes, but to increase the power of business in American life.
Judge Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has been a pro-business advocate all his lawyerly life. And we must also recall that Bush’s nominee to serve as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was Rep. Christopher Cox who, according to an SR article has consistently sought legislation which supports the big dogs over the little. If he translates his philosophy into policy, security violators will find a good friend in the regulator. He’s heavily supported by “security firm” donations.
I believe, if we go over all of Bush’s nominees with a fine tooth comb, we’ll find a steep bias toward people who will further entrench corporations in the affairs of government. Maybe this corporate bias is even worse than the religious bias the neocons sport on their expensive, hidden, jacket lapels.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS JUNK SCIENCE
H. Allen Orr in an essay, “Devolution”, in a fairly recent New Yorker points out that “intelligent design" is junk science because it fails to produce testable theorems which can be set up and tested in a laboratory. One of many failings.
IT’S MUCH IN THE GENES, HORATIO
Michael Kinsley in an LA TIMES article reproduced in the SPOKESMAN on 7 June 2005 also jumps in with an observation few Americans are really ready to accept. He writes, “As we learn more about the human mind, even qualities such as self-discipline seem to be a matter of genes, not grit.”
We’ve got such a long way to go before we can even begin to address justice and truth with any amount of fairness and justice. If our evaluations of our fellow Americans are based on unjust standards, how can we ever arrive at true justice? Will we always have to say, “Life is not just?”
WHAT’S A PHYSICIST MOMMY?
Harold Morowitz, professor of biology at George Mason University, reports that George Wald once said that, “Physicist is the atom’s way of thinking about atoms.”
This reminds of the idea that brains are the medium by which memes transmit themselves to the world, and I can’t recall who said that, where or when. Our brains are infected by memes. They colonize them and are just as alive as you or me or any other phenomena in the Cosmos. Perhaps, I’m exaggerating!
COMING TO DIE
I was over at Cabin Coffee in Browne’s addition for the first time on 13 June 2005 and I happened to see a very erotic tattoo on a sexy, dark-haired woman’s arm. From elbow to wrist it was written, “”When you come, we die.” I know enough to steer clear of that sort of woman. She’d cut me a new jib and sail me out to a far sea, stove in my bottom and sink me.
_____________________________________________________________
Aaaaarrrgh, mateys, we need a joke: "A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times." —Dan Devine, football coach
A not too distant Andrew Kohut survey of other nations on our globe, showed “U.S. status abroad waning”—so says the headline. Most nations now have a more favorable view of China than of the U.S. We are no longer the leader of the free world. Many nations fear us, but we’ve the lost the respect necessary to lead other nations. Bush just doesn’t have the values which free nations admire. In fact he’s more like an Islamic nation’s religious leader than an American president.
ARMIES HAVE TRADITIONALLY RAPED
AND PLUNDERED—SO?
According to a PBS report, a high proportion of women who join the military have been victims of sexual assault at some time in their lives. When we look at the history of rape at our military academies, we can see the problem being drawn in high profile. Think, also, of “Tailhook”, the Navy’s case of high level groping and rape. Why do American soldiers rape more than the average American male? Studies do show that soldiers are more into rape than others. Why, then, do women who have been rape victims put themselves into an organization where the power of males is supreme and where rape is more prevalent?
Here’s a case where it’s clear that those who have not done the necessary emotional work are almost unconsciously bound to set themselves up for more of the same.
BUSH’S REAL AGENDA
The real Bush agenda is to use the Christian right, not to advance their causes, but to increase the power of business in American life.
Judge Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, has been a pro-business advocate all his lawyerly life. And we must also recall that Bush’s nominee to serve as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was Rep. Christopher Cox who, according to an SR article has consistently sought legislation which supports the big dogs over the little. If he translates his philosophy into policy, security violators will find a good friend in the regulator. He’s heavily supported by “security firm” donations.
I believe, if we go over all of Bush’s nominees with a fine tooth comb, we’ll find a steep bias toward people who will further entrench corporations in the affairs of government. Maybe this corporate bias is even worse than the religious bias the neocons sport on their expensive, hidden, jacket lapels.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS JUNK SCIENCE
H. Allen Orr in an essay, “Devolution”, in a fairly recent New Yorker points out that “intelligent design" is junk science because it fails to produce testable theorems which can be set up and tested in a laboratory. One of many failings.
IT’S MUCH IN THE GENES, HORATIO
Michael Kinsley in an LA TIMES article reproduced in the SPOKESMAN on 7 June 2005 also jumps in with an observation few Americans are really ready to accept. He writes, “As we learn more about the human mind, even qualities such as self-discipline seem to be a matter of genes, not grit.”
We’ve got such a long way to go before we can even begin to address justice and truth with any amount of fairness and justice. If our evaluations of our fellow Americans are based on unjust standards, how can we ever arrive at true justice? Will we always have to say, “Life is not just?”
WHAT’S A PHYSICIST MOMMY?
Harold Morowitz, professor of biology at George Mason University, reports that George Wald once said that, “Physicist is the atom’s way of thinking about atoms.”
This reminds of the idea that brains are the medium by which memes transmit themselves to the world, and I can’t recall who said that, where or when. Our brains are infected by memes. They colonize them and are just as alive as you or me or any other phenomena in the Cosmos. Perhaps, I’m exaggerating!
COMING TO DIE
I was over at Cabin Coffee in Browne’s addition for the first time on 13 June 2005 and I happened to see a very erotic tattoo on a sexy, dark-haired woman’s arm. From elbow to wrist it was written, “”When you come, we die.” I know enough to steer clear of that sort of woman. She’d cut me a new jib and sail me out to a far sea, stove in my bottom and sink me.
_____________________________________________________________
Aaaaarrrgh, mateys, we need a joke: "A team is a team is a team. Shakespeare said that many times." —Dan Devine, football coach
Monday, September 26, 2005
MASSIVE IMAGINATIVE LEAP
According to Lawrence Krauss in his essay, “Rediscovering Creation” in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, “We now estimate that there are at least 100 billion galaxies, more or less like our own, in the visible universe, containing an average 10 billion to 100 billion stars each.”
Like Sagan’s thoughts in COSMOS, Krauss’s ideas invite us to think just how large the universe is. What if this universe is only one of many universes? How large is that thought? How many opportunities for life to emerge?
I just finished, yesterday, a long 40 lesson DVD course in Astronomy taught by Alex Philipenko in the Great Teacher series. One picture which appeared several times during his course was a Hubble deep space picture, a small segment of sky, which was filled with galaxies ever smaller, farther from view and dimmer. I had to shift my imagination to realize I was not looking at stars but at galaxies. Eventually I was able to see the spread of galaxies as a reality in my mind rather than just a picture. I freeze-framed the picture twice and just stared at it, letting my imagination soar, squinting to see the dimmest, smallest bits of light. I thought the picture was so wonderful that I called my equally wonderful wife in to show her the picture.
O’CONNER’S ON THE BALL
Retiring judge Sandra Day recently opined that the Republican controlled Congress was bent on destroying an independent judiciary. She said things have never been worse in her lifetime. An astute observer can see the underlying drive of Republicans to destroy individual freedom and to make sure we all practice Christianity (as they interpret it) and to bend every American institution to their will. They will not be happy until everything is exactly as they wish it to be. Their utopian ideals, like all utopian schemes, will inevitably lead to dictatorial institutions. They fear freedom like the plague. (SR, July 22, 2005)
BRITAIN JUST NOT AS TOUGH AS THE NEOCONS
What I want to know is why Britain has not invaded a Moslem country like Iran in retaliation for the attack by Islamic extremists on their mass transit system. What? Are they soft? Are they trying to think first and act later? I’m surprised our administration hasn’t lashed out at British lack of resolve and their failure to make some sort of Bushite, ill considered knee jerk reaction to the attack on London.
KIPLING FASHIONABLE AGAIN?
I came across this fragment of Kipling poem in Vidal’s book, EMPIRE.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
I can’t help thinking that some of our Christian brethren believe that we need to lead every one of us on this globe by the nose into their better tomorrow.
HATRED
When I try to be calm about America’s current situation, I do have to ask if we feel safer and more united now than four or five years ago, or ten years back, or twenty-five years ago when Reagan came to power. I don’t think I’ve felt more divided from my fellow citizens than I do now. I dislike whole regions of America, as if all Southerners were bigoted Ku Klux Klansmen in the closet. I picture all Westerners as wearing cattle rancher Stetsons, chewing tobacco and hating everybody from Hollywood and the Eastern establishment. I picture every Christian as an enemy of freedom who wants to impose his religion on the public square so as to make converts until we are all just like them, clones in mind and emotion.
In short, I do fear that there are enough Christian people in America to force us to become much like those backward Islamic nations dominated by religion, unscientific in nature and repressive in action.
This can’t be the truth, but our current media climate seems to create this distrust of one American for another. What can I do to help myself break free of these biases which I have developed and which keep a continual anxiety churning in my chest and stomach?
ONE LAST THOUGHT
Every strand of DNA contains a lot of junk DNA in it, stuff which seems to have no clear purpose, leftover matter from earlier adaptations, perhaps? Anyhow, the junk DNA is another proof, if you ask me, that no intelligent designer worked out this being which is me.
According to Lawrence Krauss in his essay, “Rediscovering Creation” in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, “We now estimate that there are at least 100 billion galaxies, more or less like our own, in the visible universe, containing an average 10 billion to 100 billion stars each.”
Like Sagan’s thoughts in COSMOS, Krauss’s ideas invite us to think just how large the universe is. What if this universe is only one of many universes? How large is that thought? How many opportunities for life to emerge?
I just finished, yesterday, a long 40 lesson DVD course in Astronomy taught by Alex Philipenko in the Great Teacher series. One picture which appeared several times during his course was a Hubble deep space picture, a small segment of sky, which was filled with galaxies ever smaller, farther from view and dimmer. I had to shift my imagination to realize I was not looking at stars but at galaxies. Eventually I was able to see the spread of galaxies as a reality in my mind rather than just a picture. I freeze-framed the picture twice and just stared at it, letting my imagination soar, squinting to see the dimmest, smallest bits of light. I thought the picture was so wonderful that I called my equally wonderful wife in to show her the picture.
O’CONNER’S ON THE BALL
Retiring judge Sandra Day recently opined that the Republican controlled Congress was bent on destroying an independent judiciary. She said things have never been worse in her lifetime. An astute observer can see the underlying drive of Republicans to destroy individual freedom and to make sure we all practice Christianity (as they interpret it) and to bend every American institution to their will. They will not be happy until everything is exactly as they wish it to be. Their utopian ideals, like all utopian schemes, will inevitably lead to dictatorial institutions. They fear freedom like the plague. (SR, July 22, 2005)
BRITAIN JUST NOT AS TOUGH AS THE NEOCONS
What I want to know is why Britain has not invaded a Moslem country like Iran in retaliation for the attack by Islamic extremists on their mass transit system. What? Are they soft? Are they trying to think first and act later? I’m surprised our administration hasn’t lashed out at British lack of resolve and their failure to make some sort of Bushite, ill considered knee jerk reaction to the attack on London.
KIPLING FASHIONABLE AGAIN?
I came across this fragment of Kipling poem in Vidal’s book, EMPIRE.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
I can’t help thinking that some of our Christian brethren believe that we need to lead every one of us on this globe by the nose into their better tomorrow.
HATRED
When I try to be calm about America’s current situation, I do have to ask if we feel safer and more united now than four or five years ago, or ten years back, or twenty-five years ago when Reagan came to power. I don’t think I’ve felt more divided from my fellow citizens than I do now. I dislike whole regions of America, as if all Southerners were bigoted Ku Klux Klansmen in the closet. I picture all Westerners as wearing cattle rancher Stetsons, chewing tobacco and hating everybody from Hollywood and the Eastern establishment. I picture every Christian as an enemy of freedom who wants to impose his religion on the public square so as to make converts until we are all just like them, clones in mind and emotion.
In short, I do fear that there are enough Christian people in America to force us to become much like those backward Islamic nations dominated by religion, unscientific in nature and repressive in action.
This can’t be the truth, but our current media climate seems to create this distrust of one American for another. What can I do to help myself break free of these biases which I have developed and which keep a continual anxiety churning in my chest and stomach?
ONE LAST THOUGHT
Every strand of DNA contains a lot of junk DNA in it, stuff which seems to have no clear purpose, leftover matter from earlier adaptations, perhaps? Anyhow, the junk DNA is another proof, if you ask me, that no intelligent designer worked out this being which is me.
Friday, September 23, 2005
MONKEYS HAVE CULTURE JUST LIKE THE BUSH FAMILY DOES
"The especially interesting thing about nut cracking, termite fishing and other such chimpanzee habits is that local groups have local customs, handed down locally. This is true culture. Local cultures extend to social habits and manners. For example, one local group in the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania has a particular style of social grooming known as the grooming hand clasp. The same gesture has been seen in another population in the Kibale forest in Uganda. But it has never been seen in Jane Goodall's intensively studied population at Gombe Stream. Interestingly, this gesture also spontaneously arose and spread among a captive group of chimpanzees." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 103
NEWSWEEK AND JONATHAN ALTER DO MORE GOOD STUFF
I'm looking at a map of the US. It's part of a long article that Altar did for NEWSWEEK (Sept. 19, 2005). It shows the poverty distribution around the country. As usual, with all charts of good and bad things which Americans suffer or enjoy, from most murders to most children born to teenage mothers, the Northern States and the Northeast (the blue states) show better trends than the redder South and parts of the West.
It's time we quit blaming the poor for being poor and start looking at the system which does not supply adequate education or enough high paying jobs or sufficient welfare systems to adequately support those who are stuck in poor jobs. No matter how bad communist Russia was, the poorest people generally were not as poor as many of the poor in America are. In communist Russia no one died because they didn't have health insurance and their educational system was decidedly superior to America's current system. Our very best schools probably dwarf communist Russia's average schools, but a Russian's average education was better than the American average. For example, their science education was sufficient to stamp out the lingering ignorance of Creationism and to spread the truths of natural selection.
Even though the NEWSWEEK article tried to be fair, the failures of Republicans to grasp the plight of the poor comes through clearly. Here's a few samples.
"A rising tide of economic growth is no longer lifting all boats. For the first time in half a century, the third year of a recovery (2004) also saw an increase of poverty. In a nation of nearly 300 million people, the number living below the poverty line. . . recently hit 37 million, up more than a million in a year."
". . .the poverty rate. . . is the highest in the developed world and more than twice as high as in most other industrialized countries, which all strike a more generous social contract with their weakest citizens."
"The last notable poverty expert working in the White House, John Dilulia, departed in 2001 after explaining that the administration had no interest in real policy analysis." [No wonder! Bush is too dumb to understand policy analysis. 'Don't confuse me with figures,' he figures, 'just give me the falsehood that'll support my prejudices.']
"The primary economic problem is not unemployment but low wages for worker; of all races. WIth unions weakened and a minimum-wage increase not on the GOP agenda, wages have not kept pace with the cost of living, except at the top. (In 1965, CEOs made 24 times as much as the average worker; by 2003, they earned 185 times as much.) Since 2001, the United States has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs." [Note: minimum wage not on the GOP agenda.]
"Following the Gatreaux model in Chicago, the Clinton administration launched a "scatter-site" housing program in four cities that found homes for the poor in mixed income neighborhoods. While the move doesn't much benefit adults, their children—confronted with higher expectations and a less harmful peer group—do much better. "It really helped in Atlanta," says Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the civil-rights movement. Bush and the GOP Congress killed the idea, as well as the Youth Opportunity Grant program, which had shown success in partnering with the private sector to help prepare disadvantaged teens for work and life. They tried to cut after-school programs—proven winners—by 40 percent, then settled for a freeze." [That's right, the compassionate conservatives made and attempted to make these cuts.]
"Racism was clearly present in the aftermath of Katrina. Readers of Yahoo News noticed it when a pair of waterlogged whites were described in a caption as "carrying" food while another picture (from a different wire service) of blacks holding food described them as 'looters." White suburban police closed at least one bridge to keep a group of blacks from fleeing to white areas. Over the course of two days, a white river-taxi operator from hard-hit St. Bernard Parish rescued scores of people from flooded areas and ferried them to safety. All were white. "A n--ger is a n--ger is a n--ger," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. Then he said it again." [That's the Republican South, folks, the new party of racism, the party of self-described 'compassion'. Laura, girl, maybe you don't think your man is cruel and racist, but the party he leads certainly is. How'd he get to be associating with a party by, for and of racists?]
"Until Katrina intervened, the top priority for the GOP when Congress reconvened was permanent repeal of the estate tax, which applies to far less than 1 percent of taxpayers. (IRS figures show that only 1,607 wealthy people in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi even pay the tax, out of more than 4 million taxpayers—one twenty-fifth of 1 percent.) Repeal would cost the government $ 24 billion a year. Meanwhile, House GOP leaders are set to slash food stamps by billions in order to protect subsidies to wealthy farmers. But Katrina could change the climate. The aftermath was not a good omen for the Grover Norquists of the world who want to slash taxes more and shrink government to the size where it can be 'strangled in the bathtub'."
"The especially interesting thing about nut cracking, termite fishing and other such chimpanzee habits is that local groups have local customs, handed down locally. This is true culture. Local cultures extend to social habits and manners. For example, one local group in the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania has a particular style of social grooming known as the grooming hand clasp. The same gesture has been seen in another population in the Kibale forest in Uganda. But it has never been seen in Jane Goodall's intensively studied population at Gombe Stream. Interestingly, this gesture also spontaneously arose and spread among a captive group of chimpanzees." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 103
NEWSWEEK AND JONATHAN ALTER DO MORE GOOD STUFF
I'm looking at a map of the US. It's part of a long article that Altar did for NEWSWEEK (Sept. 19, 2005). It shows the poverty distribution around the country. As usual, with all charts of good and bad things which Americans suffer or enjoy, from most murders to most children born to teenage mothers, the Northern States and the Northeast (the blue states) show better trends than the redder South and parts of the West.
It's time we quit blaming the poor for being poor and start looking at the system which does not supply adequate education or enough high paying jobs or sufficient welfare systems to adequately support those who are stuck in poor jobs. No matter how bad communist Russia was, the poorest people generally were not as poor as many of the poor in America are. In communist Russia no one died because they didn't have health insurance and their educational system was decidedly superior to America's current system. Our very best schools probably dwarf communist Russia's average schools, but a Russian's average education was better than the American average. For example, their science education was sufficient to stamp out the lingering ignorance of Creationism and to spread the truths of natural selection.
Even though the NEWSWEEK article tried to be fair, the failures of Republicans to grasp the plight of the poor comes through clearly. Here's a few samples.
"A rising tide of economic growth is no longer lifting all boats. For the first time in half a century, the third year of a recovery (2004) also saw an increase of poverty. In a nation of nearly 300 million people, the number living below the poverty line. . . recently hit 37 million, up more than a million in a year."
". . .the poverty rate. . . is the highest in the developed world and more than twice as high as in most other industrialized countries, which all strike a more generous social contract with their weakest citizens."
"The last notable poverty expert working in the White House, John Dilulia, departed in 2001 after explaining that the administration had no interest in real policy analysis." [No wonder! Bush is too dumb to understand policy analysis. 'Don't confuse me with figures,' he figures, 'just give me the falsehood that'll support my prejudices.']
"The primary economic problem is not unemployment but low wages for worker; of all races. WIth unions weakened and a minimum-wage increase not on the GOP agenda, wages have not kept pace with the cost of living, except at the top. (In 1965, CEOs made 24 times as much as the average worker; by 2003, they earned 185 times as much.) Since 2001, the United States has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs." [Note: minimum wage not on the GOP agenda.]
"Following the Gatreaux model in Chicago, the Clinton administration launched a "scatter-site" housing program in four cities that found homes for the poor in mixed income neighborhoods. While the move doesn't much benefit adults, their children—confronted with higher expectations and a less harmful peer group—do much better. "It really helped in Atlanta," says Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the civil-rights movement. Bush and the GOP Congress killed the idea, as well as the Youth Opportunity Grant program, which had shown success in partnering with the private sector to help prepare disadvantaged teens for work and life. They tried to cut after-school programs—proven winners—by 40 percent, then settled for a freeze." [That's right, the compassionate conservatives made and attempted to make these cuts.]
"Racism was clearly present in the aftermath of Katrina. Readers of Yahoo News noticed it when a pair of waterlogged whites were described in a caption as "carrying" food while another picture (from a different wire service) of blacks holding food described them as 'looters." White suburban police closed at least one bridge to keep a group of blacks from fleeing to white areas. Over the course of two days, a white river-taxi operator from hard-hit St. Bernard Parish rescued scores of people from flooded areas and ferried them to safety. All were white. "A n--ger is a n--ger is a n--ger," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter. Then he said it again." [That's the Republican South, folks, the new party of racism, the party of self-described 'compassion'. Laura, girl, maybe you don't think your man is cruel and racist, but the party he leads certainly is. How'd he get to be associating with a party by, for and of racists?]
"Until Katrina intervened, the top priority for the GOP when Congress reconvened was permanent repeal of the estate tax, which applies to far less than 1 percent of taxpayers. (IRS figures show that only 1,607 wealthy people in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi even pay the tax, out of more than 4 million taxpayers—one twenty-fifth of 1 percent.) Repeal would cost the government $ 24 billion a year. Meanwhile, House GOP leaders are set to slash food stamps by billions in order to protect subsidies to wealthy farmers. But Katrina could change the climate. The aftermath was not a good omen for the Grover Norquists of the world who want to slash taxes more and shrink government to the size where it can be 'strangled in the bathtub'."
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
SUCKING UP THE WEALTH
By now, everyone knows that the contracts for recovery in New Orleans are being offered up without bidding to the same kind of Republican-loving corporations who got all the contracts "without bidding" in Iraq. This administration is the most corrupt and unscrupulous I've ever experienced, maybe the worst in history, and Bush and company still remain popular with 40 percent of the American people. This is about the same percentage of Americans who, with the magical thinking of children, still accept Genesis as absolutely true. Our poor educational systems are finally bearing fruit for the Republican Party faithful.
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
The following three segments about quantum mechanics are by David Freedman in his essay "Quantum Liaisons" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore. I don't know nothing about the subject. I read and I read and I still struggle with it, but this makes a little of the fog clear out of my brain.
[Open quote] Ever since it burst onto the scene in the 1920s, quantum mechanics has been stupefyingly efficient at predicting the inner workings of everything from stars to digital watches. The theory is also a mortal enemy of common sense. At its heart is the pronouncement that the result of any observation or measurement is influenced by chance; even worse, it insists that when an object is not being observed it is at once everywhere and nowhere. Physicists are quick to claim that quantum mechanical weirdness applies only to submicroscopic specks of matter like atoms and quarks, and not to everyday, full-sized objects like socks, which apparently disappear for other reasons. But physicists, who are normally regarded as a tell-it-like-it-is kind of people, are not being entirely ingenuous in this matter. A glance out the window does indeed provide evidence that the world at large is protected from quantum-mechanical bizarreness, but the truth is that no one has ever been able to offer a convincing explanation as to why this might be so.
Einstein fumed at this indefinite, chancy view of nature and charged that quantum mechanics was at best an incomplete theory. But Niels Bohr, Einstein's nemesis in this regard, responded with the physics version of Don't Worry, Be Happy: if quantum mechanics doesn't jibe with our view of reality, he said, then our view of reality is wrong. Generations of physicists have been only too happy to treat Bohr's intellectual shrug as the last word on the question, conveniently allowing them to employ quantum mechanics every day in their laboratories without ever having to fret over the fact that the lab and everything in it supposedly melt into a Twilight Zone of indeterminate possibilities as soon as they turn out the lights and leave. [Close quote]
COOKING WITHOUT MEASUREMENTS
[Open quote] Then, in 1984, in mulling over Einstein's thought experiment in which a measurement of one particle instantly affects a second particle some vast distance away, Aharonov [a physicist] was drawn back to his old future-past idea. It had suddenly occurred to him that according to the special theory of relativity—which states that observers moving at different speeds won't agree on the simultaneity of two events at different locations—an observer whizzing by at high speed could find that the second particle registers an effect just before the measurement is made to the first particle. "To that observer," he says, "it would seem that the results of the measurement to the first particle have come from the future to influence the second particle." Could such a bizarre effect be demonstrated?
A certain catch-22 built into quantum mechanics appeared to eliminate that intriguing possibility. Common sense declares that performing an experiment on a particle in the present has an effect on experiments performed in the future (you can confirm this in your backyard with croquet balls), and for once, quantum mechanics concurs with common sense. Thus if you want to test the effect of the future on the present, you'd better not make any measurements now, lest you disturb the future before the future has a chance to disturb what you're doing now. According to the time-honored interpretation of quantum mechanics, if there is no measurement, then there is no reality. In other words, the future may have an effect on the past—but only if you don't try to find out what that effect is. [Close quote]
All I got to say is, "Hunh?"
HERE'S THE PROOF IN THE PUDDING
"In other words, because quantum mechanics dictates that any experiment will always be subject to an element of randomness, the experimenter simply doesn't have the freedom to determine an experiment's outcome completely. That means you can't reliably rig an experiment to produce a result that will influence the past in such a way as to violate causality. And therein, from his point of view, lies Aharonov's real triumph: in showing how quantum-mechanical uncertainty acts as a sort of anti-causality-violation Scotchgard for the fabric of reality, he has given nature an excuse for intimately incorporating randomness in its structure."
All I gotta add is you should try to get hold of this book and read the essay yourself if your as dense in this field as I am. It's fascinating reading and trying to rap your noggin around it.
By now, everyone knows that the contracts for recovery in New Orleans are being offered up without bidding to the same kind of Republican-loving corporations who got all the contracts "without bidding" in Iraq. This administration is the most corrupt and unscrupulous I've ever experienced, maybe the worst in history, and Bush and company still remain popular with 40 percent of the American people. This is about the same percentage of Americans who, with the magical thinking of children, still accept Genesis as absolutely true. Our poor educational systems are finally bearing fruit for the Republican Party faithful.
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
The following three segments about quantum mechanics are by David Freedman in his essay "Quantum Liaisons" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore. I don't know nothing about the subject. I read and I read and I still struggle with it, but this makes a little of the fog clear out of my brain.
[Open quote] Ever since it burst onto the scene in the 1920s, quantum mechanics has been stupefyingly efficient at predicting the inner workings of everything from stars to digital watches. The theory is also a mortal enemy of common sense. At its heart is the pronouncement that the result of any observation or measurement is influenced by chance; even worse, it insists that when an object is not being observed it is at once everywhere and nowhere. Physicists are quick to claim that quantum mechanical weirdness applies only to submicroscopic specks of matter like atoms and quarks, and not to everyday, full-sized objects like socks, which apparently disappear for other reasons. But physicists, who are normally regarded as a tell-it-like-it-is kind of people, are not being entirely ingenuous in this matter. A glance out the window does indeed provide evidence that the world at large is protected from quantum-mechanical bizarreness, but the truth is that no one has ever been able to offer a convincing explanation as to why this might be so.
Einstein fumed at this indefinite, chancy view of nature and charged that quantum mechanics was at best an incomplete theory. But Niels Bohr, Einstein's nemesis in this regard, responded with the physics version of Don't Worry, Be Happy: if quantum mechanics doesn't jibe with our view of reality, he said, then our view of reality is wrong. Generations of physicists have been only too happy to treat Bohr's intellectual shrug as the last word on the question, conveniently allowing them to employ quantum mechanics every day in their laboratories without ever having to fret over the fact that the lab and everything in it supposedly melt into a Twilight Zone of indeterminate possibilities as soon as they turn out the lights and leave. [Close quote]
COOKING WITHOUT MEASUREMENTS
[Open quote] Then, in 1984, in mulling over Einstein's thought experiment in which a measurement of one particle instantly affects a second particle some vast distance away, Aharonov [a physicist] was drawn back to his old future-past idea. It had suddenly occurred to him that according to the special theory of relativity—which states that observers moving at different speeds won't agree on the simultaneity of two events at different locations—an observer whizzing by at high speed could find that the second particle registers an effect just before the measurement is made to the first particle. "To that observer," he says, "it would seem that the results of the measurement to the first particle have come from the future to influence the second particle." Could such a bizarre effect be demonstrated?
A certain catch-22 built into quantum mechanics appeared to eliminate that intriguing possibility. Common sense declares that performing an experiment on a particle in the present has an effect on experiments performed in the future (you can confirm this in your backyard with croquet balls), and for once, quantum mechanics concurs with common sense. Thus if you want to test the effect of the future on the present, you'd better not make any measurements now, lest you disturb the future before the future has a chance to disturb what you're doing now. According to the time-honored interpretation of quantum mechanics, if there is no measurement, then there is no reality. In other words, the future may have an effect on the past—but only if you don't try to find out what that effect is. [Close quote]
All I got to say is, "Hunh?"
HERE'S THE PROOF IN THE PUDDING
"In other words, because quantum mechanics dictates that any experiment will always be subject to an element of randomness, the experimenter simply doesn't have the freedom to determine an experiment's outcome completely. That means you can't reliably rig an experiment to produce a result that will influence the past in such a way as to violate causality. And therein, from his point of view, lies Aharonov's real triumph: in showing how quantum-mechanical uncertainty acts as a sort of anti-causality-violation Scotchgard for the fabric of reality, he has given nature an excuse for intimately incorporating randomness in its structure."
All I gotta add is you should try to get hold of this book and read the essay yourself if your as dense in this field as I am. It's fascinating reading and trying to rap your noggin around it.
Monday, September 19, 2005
TODAY A CHILL IN THE AIR
It's going to be autumn this week. We're heading for a fall—a leaf fall. We'll be falling in love with fall is falling for rake the-leaves. Anyway, this week I'll be registering for some college course or another at SCC, with a senior waver, and when I start studying, perhaps this blog will fall on hard times. I took a math class two years ago, and the homework took up hours and hours of time which I now put into scanning and writing this blog. We'll see. This warning is just a little heads up to my one or two readers out there. I also see that I need to read Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet if I want to be part of a discussion of that book at the South Hill Library on October 11. I read that book ten thousand years ago in the 60s or very early 70s. I've never forgotten it, quite, though many details escape me. It's stream of conscious technique is what I recall most clearly. Will I read it? Do I have the time? Do I dare to eat a peach? Will I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled? Do I hear the eternal footman, who's holding my coat, snicker? I've measured out my life with coffee spoons. . . . ah, well. . . .
NO FEELING, NO DOING?
Robert Wright asks an interesting question of those of us who believe that men and women are darn nearly robots and have little free will. In short, what is the adaptive function of fear if action is all that's required to escape the green meanies of predation?
"Science lives by the credo of the mechanics: everything about the structure and behavior of all organisms is explicable in sheerly physical terms, and therefore is amenable to scientific inquiry. This can-do spirit has gotten science where it is today, and I think it's the proper attitude of a scientist. But as we've seen, the flip side of the view that everything functional is physical is that what's not physical has no function. Our feelings, according to the credo of science, affect our behavior no more than a shadow affects a puppet. Well, if feelings have no function, then why are they here? A scientist—a mechanic—cannot answer that question. He can and should try to explain why evolution produced everything physical and observable about us—toenails, eardrums, brains, and all the intricate behavior brains govern. But if he's going to insist that consciousness doesn't do anything, he'll be hard pressed to explain why evolution created it.
"In other words, a scientist can readily explain the evolution of the physiology that produces fear: adrenaline and various other tangible forms of information together got our ancestors to flee from saber-toothed tigers and thus were favored by natural selection. But why does that physiology produce, in addition to the fleeing, the feeling of fear? That's the tough question. If the feeling is truly superfluous, then there can be no evolutionary explanation of it." —Robert Wright in "Why Is It Like Something To Be Alive?" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore
THE THINKING POTATO
I mut admit to having thoughts that lead me to conclude that a rock is just as willful as I am. See what Martin Gardner in his essay "Computers Near The Threshold?" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore, has to say about the matter:
[Open quote] First, I should make clear that I am not a vitalist who thinks there is a "ghost in the machine"—a soul distinct from the brain. I believe that the human mind, like the mind of any lower animal, is a function of a material lump of organic matter. Although I remain open to the Platonic possibility of a disembodied soul, as I am open to any metaphysical notion not logically contradictory, the evidence against it seems overwhelming. Strong arguments for a functional view of the mind are too familiar to need summarlzlng.
If a human has a nonmaterial soul, it is hard to see why the same should not be said of an amoeba, a plant, or even a pebble. A few panpsychic monists such as Charles Hartshorne actually do say this, but I consider it an absurd misuse of words, a "category mistake," to talk of a potato in a dark cellar as having what Butler called "a certain degree of cunning." [Close quote]
________________________________________
"Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age."—William Feather
It's going to be autumn this week. We're heading for a fall—a leaf fall. We'll be falling in love with fall is falling for rake the-leaves. Anyway, this week I'll be registering for some college course or another at SCC, with a senior waver, and when I start studying, perhaps this blog will fall on hard times. I took a math class two years ago, and the homework took up hours and hours of time which I now put into scanning and writing this blog. We'll see. This warning is just a little heads up to my one or two readers out there. I also see that I need to read Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet if I want to be part of a discussion of that book at the South Hill Library on October 11. I read that book ten thousand years ago in the 60s or very early 70s. I've never forgotten it, quite, though many details escape me. It's stream of conscious technique is what I recall most clearly. Will I read it? Do I have the time? Do I dare to eat a peach? Will I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled? Do I hear the eternal footman, who's holding my coat, snicker? I've measured out my life with coffee spoons. . . . ah, well. . . .
NO FEELING, NO DOING?
Robert Wright asks an interesting question of those of us who believe that men and women are darn nearly robots and have little free will. In short, what is the adaptive function of fear if action is all that's required to escape the green meanies of predation?
"Science lives by the credo of the mechanics: everything about the structure and behavior of all organisms is explicable in sheerly physical terms, and therefore is amenable to scientific inquiry. This can-do spirit has gotten science where it is today, and I think it's the proper attitude of a scientist. But as we've seen, the flip side of the view that everything functional is physical is that what's not physical has no function. Our feelings, according to the credo of science, affect our behavior no more than a shadow affects a puppet. Well, if feelings have no function, then why are they here? A scientist—a mechanic—cannot answer that question. He can and should try to explain why evolution produced everything physical and observable about us—toenails, eardrums, brains, and all the intricate behavior brains govern. But if he's going to insist that consciousness doesn't do anything, he'll be hard pressed to explain why evolution created it.
"In other words, a scientist can readily explain the evolution of the physiology that produces fear: adrenaline and various other tangible forms of information together got our ancestors to flee from saber-toothed tigers and thus were favored by natural selection. But why does that physiology produce, in addition to the fleeing, the feeling of fear? That's the tough question. If the feeling is truly superfluous, then there can be no evolutionary explanation of it." —Robert Wright in "Why Is It Like Something To Be Alive?" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore
THE THINKING POTATO
I mut admit to having thoughts that lead me to conclude that a rock is just as willful as I am. See what Martin Gardner in his essay "Computers Near The Threshold?" in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William Shore, has to say about the matter:
[Open quote] First, I should make clear that I am not a vitalist who thinks there is a "ghost in the machine"—a soul distinct from the brain. I believe that the human mind, like the mind of any lower animal, is a function of a material lump of organic matter. Although I remain open to the Platonic possibility of a disembodied soul, as I am open to any metaphysical notion not logically contradictory, the evidence against it seems overwhelming. Strong arguments for a functional view of the mind are too familiar to need summarlzlng.
If a human has a nonmaterial soul, it is hard to see why the same should not be said of an amoeba, a plant, or even a pebble. A few panpsychic monists such as Charles Hartshorne actually do say this, but I consider it an absurd misuse of words, a "category mistake," to talk of a potato in a dark cellar as having what Butler called "a certain degree of cunning." [Close quote]
________________________________________
"Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age."—William Feather
Friday, September 16, 2005
THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL
Yep! It's an illusion, but seems like it's very important to our sense of survival for the identity.
[Open quote] Those who contend that computers will eventually be privy to experiences traditionally reserved for humanity are a diverse group. One large contingent could be loosely labeled scientific materialists, or perhaps determinists, but for short we will call them the mechanics, because they believe that human beings (and all other forms of life) are like GMC pickup trucks—entirely explicable in terms of engineering. They maintain that every aspect of behavior, sensation, and thought is a product of the processing of information. And by information they mean physical information: hormones, synaptic firings, sound waves, light particles, and so on.
If the mechanics are correct in this belief, then presumably it is possible, by controlling the flow of information in a computer, to replicate human experience with precision. Why should the computer's electrons be any different from the brain's synaptic firings? Information is information, right? And besides, even if it isn't—even if for some reason synaptic firings are the only kind of information that will yield consciousness—that's no problem; in principle, someday, we could build a computer that runs on synaptic firings. So one way or another, with the right hardware, the right software, and enough time, we should be able to create computers flushed with pride, riddled with doubt, or alienated by the rapid pace of technological change. . . .
The average mechanic would. . . would argue that consciousness has the same relationship to your brain that shadows in a shadow play have to the puppets producing them. There is a close correspondence between the two at any given time, but not because the shadow is influencing the puppets; rather, the causality moves entirely in the other direction: puppets determine shadows, and your brain determines how you feel. Thus the sense that some intangible aspect of yourself has power and somehow affects your neurological activity is all in your head. This is the illusion of free will under which we all labor every day. To put the mechanics' point in technical terminology: consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of physiological processes. It is affected by them but does not affect them.
Given this view of consciousness, it is easy to see why a mechanic wouldn't be threatened by the prospect that computers may someday be conscious. Shadow consciousness, after all, doesn't gum up the works; it may feel messy to the computer—all those sappy emotions burdening the binary spirit—but it won't upset the machine's smooth predictability. The electrons corresponding to it—the electrons that cast it as their shadow —will be running through the computer in perfect accordance with the programer's dictates. [Close quote]
From MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, pp. 110-112, edited by William Shore
RED STATES' FAMILY VALUES SHAFT EDUCATION
From a USAToday front page factoid on two days running (April 5 and 6), we discover that blue states New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont spend the most per capita on their children’s education while archly red states like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Mississippi (always down there) spend the least. Yep, family values sure show through, don’t they? The most conservative times (say the Dark Ages?) are when illiteracy looms large and the most liberal times are when literacy grows universal (say 1776?).
___________________________________________________
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." —Adolph Hitler (describing the red state mentality)
Yep! It's an illusion, but seems like it's very important to our sense of survival for the identity.
[Open quote] Those who contend that computers will eventually be privy to experiences traditionally reserved for humanity are a diverse group. One large contingent could be loosely labeled scientific materialists, or perhaps determinists, but for short we will call them the mechanics, because they believe that human beings (and all other forms of life) are like GMC pickup trucks—entirely explicable in terms of engineering. They maintain that every aspect of behavior, sensation, and thought is a product of the processing of information. And by information they mean physical information: hormones, synaptic firings, sound waves, light particles, and so on.
If the mechanics are correct in this belief, then presumably it is possible, by controlling the flow of information in a computer, to replicate human experience with precision. Why should the computer's electrons be any different from the brain's synaptic firings? Information is information, right? And besides, even if it isn't—even if for some reason synaptic firings are the only kind of information that will yield consciousness—that's no problem; in principle, someday, we could build a computer that runs on synaptic firings. So one way or another, with the right hardware, the right software, and enough time, we should be able to create computers flushed with pride, riddled with doubt, or alienated by the rapid pace of technological change. . . .
The average mechanic would. . . would argue that consciousness has the same relationship to your brain that shadows in a shadow play have to the puppets producing them. There is a close correspondence between the two at any given time, but not because the shadow is influencing the puppets; rather, the causality moves entirely in the other direction: puppets determine shadows, and your brain determines how you feel. Thus the sense that some intangible aspect of yourself has power and somehow affects your neurological activity is all in your head. This is the illusion of free will under which we all labor every day. To put the mechanics' point in technical terminology: consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of physiological processes. It is affected by them but does not affect them.
Given this view of consciousness, it is easy to see why a mechanic wouldn't be threatened by the prospect that computers may someday be conscious. Shadow consciousness, after all, doesn't gum up the works; it may feel messy to the computer—all those sappy emotions burdening the binary spirit—but it won't upset the machine's smooth predictability. The electrons corresponding to it—the electrons that cast it as their shadow —will be running through the computer in perfect accordance with the programer's dictates. [Close quote]
From MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, pp. 110-112, edited by William Shore
RED STATES' FAMILY VALUES SHAFT EDUCATION
From a USAToday front page factoid on two days running (April 5 and 6), we discover that blue states New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont spend the most per capita on their children’s education while archly red states like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Mississippi (always down there) spend the least. Yep, family values sure show through, don’t they? The most conservative times (say the Dark Ages?) are when illiteracy looms large and the most liberal times are when literacy grows universal (say 1776?).
___________________________________________________
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." —Adolph Hitler (describing the red state mentality)
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
WHY SCIENCE AND RELIGION ARE AT OPPOSITE POLES
Below is a comment about one of my blogs which delved into the concept of what people mean when they speak of a “god’s will”. Jeremy is an intelligent and literate believer so I don’t mean any disrespect.
Comments:
George, for someone as intelligent as you are, I expect a more intelligent critique than this, which essentially strips our English word "will" of its rich semantic range. Truly, and sadly, Christians abuse the concept of God's will terribly, but their abuse doesn't negate the proper use. If you were to do a study of the semantic range of the word "will" in the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek texts of what we call the Bible, you'd see that what we translate into the one word "will" is actually several different words. Do you mean decretive will, preceptive will, or something else?
I'm not siding with our President, I assure you, but I am saying that not all of us understand these concepts similarly.
Jeremy, I have a very firm and non-philosophical definition of "will" in mind. It is that chemical point which triggers a thought to become conscious in the brain and it is that chemical buildup to a moment of triggering which allows for an action to take place. For will to be exercised, there must occur a necessary buildup of chemical activity to cause a yes/no act to happen. Will, for me, is a purely yes/no chemical triggering in the brain of animals and humans. Sometimes this act of will which causes a thought to appear or an act to happen occurs in a pre-conscious moment too. We are not always aware that a triggering has occurred before it happens. The best book about this isTHE ORGIN OF MINDS by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham. I think they nail it pretty good.
GOD’S MOUTHPIECE’S MOUTHPIECE
So we all learned recently in a NEWSWEEK piece (June 27, 2005) that Billy Graham has a publicity man (Larry Ross) who guards his relations with the press. Since Billy is a publicity man for the idea of a god, Larry is twice removed from the mouth of power. My problem with the whole chain of mouthpieces remains the question, “Why would an all powerful, omniscient, omnipresent supernatural being require two or more mouthpieces to get its message across? Why does Billy need a mouthpiece and why does god need a mouthpiece?
Think, on the other hand, how humble real scientific truth is. With little fanfare and with few supporters, just by the force of the rationality of its arguments, in the modern mind it wins over the informed consent of human intelligence. It doesn’t require hoopla like a crusade or the exhortations of emotional manipulators to get its message across. It appeals to reason and only the irrational fail to get that message. True, if the world would suddenly fill with only the irrational, then, perhaps, what is untrue would seem true in the mouths of the butter-melters. We only have to look as far as Iran or Saudi Arabia to see a world where the likes of Billy and Franklin Graham rule. Is that what we want for America? Truly?
A RACIST STORY FROM THE SOUTHLAND
Back in 1974 I was married for a very brief time to a woman born and bred in the deep South. I had a college degree and she had an 8th grade education. She was a shipboard electrician who worked at the shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi while I was a machinist/alcoholic who was beginning to drift from my roots in southern Ohio who also worked at the Pascagoula shipyard for a time. She claimed to being 1/8th Cherokee blood and her thick, very black hair gave evidence of those roots. We made this marriage while I was living in Mobile, Alabama on the spur of the moment during a break from work caused by a rain storm which made footing difficult for electricians, like my wife, to work on the decks of the warships they build at that shipyard. We were married in our work clothes by a justice of the peace in Pascagoula, Mississippi. During that period in my lifely perambulations, I had the outlandish notion that I was going to forget my education and intellect, drink Budweiser, fish off the pier in Mobile bay, work in the shipyards at Pascagoula and become a “down home man”. This marriage and accompanying notions lasted about six months.
My wife had a four or five year old boy who was due to start school that fall. Then came the order by a federal judge that Mobile, Alabama’s schools must be integrated. I was unaware of the impending situation, but most of Mobile had been on the alert all summer. I came home from work (or school—I was attempting for the second time to complete a master’s degree) to find my wife hurrying around to get her son ready for school, but it turns out that she was not getting him ready for public school. She had to hurry because private schools were springing up all over the city and racists like my wife needed to make sure she could get a slot in one of the private schools in Mobile.
My picture of the situation may not be entirely clear, but it seemed to me that nearly the entire school population of Mobile shifted from public to private overnight. Just like that! Boom! I don’t know anything more about what happened with time, for my marriage was soon ended, and I drifted off to another state in another corner of the USA. But the Katrina, New Orleans situation tells me that not a lot has changed and that the Republican Party’s drive to privatize education might have racist roots as black as my Cherokee wife’s hair.
_____________________________________
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in the air and water that are doing it.” —that’s right! —George Bush
Below is a comment about one of my blogs which delved into the concept of what people mean when they speak of a “god’s will”. Jeremy is an intelligent and literate believer so I don’t mean any disrespect.
Comments:
George, for someone as intelligent as you are, I expect a more intelligent critique than this, which essentially strips our English word "will" of its rich semantic range. Truly, and sadly, Christians abuse the concept of God's will terribly, but their abuse doesn't negate the proper use. If you were to do a study of the semantic range of the word "will" in the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek texts of what we call the Bible, you'd see that what we translate into the one word "will" is actually several different words. Do you mean decretive will, preceptive will, or something else?
I'm not siding with our President, I assure you, but I am saying that not all of us understand these concepts similarly.
Jeremy, I have a very firm and non-philosophical definition of "will" in mind. It is that chemical point which triggers a thought to become conscious in the brain and it is that chemical buildup to a moment of triggering which allows for an action to take place. For will to be exercised, there must occur a necessary buildup of chemical activity to cause a yes/no act to happen. Will, for me, is a purely yes/no chemical triggering in the brain of animals and humans. Sometimes this act of will which causes a thought to appear or an act to happen occurs in a pre-conscious moment too. We are not always aware that a triggering has occurred before it happens. The best book about this isTHE ORGIN OF MINDS by Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham. I think they nail it pretty good.
GOD’S MOUTHPIECE’S MOUTHPIECE
So we all learned recently in a NEWSWEEK piece (June 27, 2005) that Billy Graham has a publicity man (Larry Ross) who guards his relations with the press. Since Billy is a publicity man for the idea of a god, Larry is twice removed from the mouth of power. My problem with the whole chain of mouthpieces remains the question, “Why would an all powerful, omniscient, omnipresent supernatural being require two or more mouthpieces to get its message across? Why does Billy need a mouthpiece and why does god need a mouthpiece?
Think, on the other hand, how humble real scientific truth is. With little fanfare and with few supporters, just by the force of the rationality of its arguments, in the modern mind it wins over the informed consent of human intelligence. It doesn’t require hoopla like a crusade or the exhortations of emotional manipulators to get its message across. It appeals to reason and only the irrational fail to get that message. True, if the world would suddenly fill with only the irrational, then, perhaps, what is untrue would seem true in the mouths of the butter-melters. We only have to look as far as Iran or Saudi Arabia to see a world where the likes of Billy and Franklin Graham rule. Is that what we want for America? Truly?
A RACIST STORY FROM THE SOUTHLAND
Back in 1974 I was married for a very brief time to a woman born and bred in the deep South. I had a college degree and she had an 8th grade education. She was a shipboard electrician who worked at the shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi while I was a machinist/alcoholic who was beginning to drift from my roots in southern Ohio who also worked at the Pascagoula shipyard for a time. She claimed to being 1/8th Cherokee blood and her thick, very black hair gave evidence of those roots. We made this marriage while I was living in Mobile, Alabama on the spur of the moment during a break from work caused by a rain storm which made footing difficult for electricians, like my wife, to work on the decks of the warships they build at that shipyard. We were married in our work clothes by a justice of the peace in Pascagoula, Mississippi. During that period in my lifely perambulations, I had the outlandish notion that I was going to forget my education and intellect, drink Budweiser, fish off the pier in Mobile bay, work in the shipyards at Pascagoula and become a “down home man”. This marriage and accompanying notions lasted about six months.
My wife had a four or five year old boy who was due to start school that fall. Then came the order by a federal judge that Mobile, Alabama’s schools must be integrated. I was unaware of the impending situation, but most of Mobile had been on the alert all summer. I came home from work (or school—I was attempting for the second time to complete a master’s degree) to find my wife hurrying around to get her son ready for school, but it turns out that she was not getting him ready for public school. She had to hurry because private schools were springing up all over the city and racists like my wife needed to make sure she could get a slot in one of the private schools in Mobile.
My picture of the situation may not be entirely clear, but it seemed to me that nearly the entire school population of Mobile shifted from public to private overnight. Just like that! Boom! I don’t know anything more about what happened with time, for my marriage was soon ended, and I drifted off to another state in another corner of the USA. But the Katrina, New Orleans situation tells me that not a lot has changed and that the Republican Party’s drive to privatize education might have racist roots as black as my Cherokee wife’s hair.
_____________________________________
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in the air and water that are doing it.” —that’s right! —George Bush
Monday, September 12, 2005
WHO CAN FORGET EVE? HOW DID THEY FIND HER?
Here's another interesting and recent scientific venture. Eve was the name given to the hypothetical first female in the human chain to modern man. She was discovered to have come from sub-Saharan Africa and lived about 200,000 years ago. It's quite clear and interesting what scientists did to determine when and where "Eve" lived.
Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and the late Allan Wilson of Berkeley drew blood samples from people in five geographic populations and analyzed them: ". . . . What they found at Berkeley was that their 147 samples differed by an average of 0.57 percent. How long would it take mankind's mitochondrial DNA to differ by that crucial half a percent? Well, the Berkeley people believe that this kind of DNA (which is different from the more popular nuclear DNA and is located not in the nucleus but in mitochondria, the energy producing organelles of the cell) mutates at a rate of 2 to 4 percent every million years. If you divide 2 and 4 percent by 0.57 percent you get 3.5 and 7, and if you divide a million years by 3.5 and 7 you get 142,500 to 285,000 years. The researchers concluded it would take that length of time to cause the differences in DNA that they noted in blood samples taken around the world. The median figure comes to 200,000 years ago—in the general time frame that fossil scientists like the Leakeys had hypothesized for the evolution of modern man from ape-man stock."
The scientists found that the sub-Saharan Africa samples had the most genetic mutations of any populations on Earth, "meaning the process [of mutation] had been going on longer in than African population than among the Chinese or Europeans or Australians." The deepest roots of humankind were, therefore, in Africa, the beginnings of humankind.
From an essay, "The Search For Eve" by Michael Brown in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William H. Shore, pp. 87-88.
Let me give a little boost to this book. It's a collection of essays by generalists in science and by scientists themselves which were collected together by the William Shore into a book which was then sold to benefit world hunger. This particular book was the second one put together for charitable purposes by Mr. Shore.
O, THOSE OLD BIBLE BLUES
Now you see them, all ten of them, then you don't. Some more Bible confusion in the source book itself. God sure was a mixed up cuss. Almost as if it/he/she didn't know its own mind. Over and over, not knowing it. . . .
[Open Quote] The complex textual history of the Commandments suggests that the more you study the Bible, the less certain you become of your ability to divine the precise Word of God. That's a useful lesson in this divided time.
Most public displays of the Ten Commandments, including the ones in Texas and Kentucky that the Supreme Court dealt with, are based on Exodus 20, verses 2-14, where God speaks directly to the Israelites. But if you grew up as I did, studying the Bible in its original Hebrew, you know that there's a second, equally valid version in Deuteronomy 5:6-18. And the two versions differ. In Exodus, God says to remember the Sabbath because he created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In Deuteronomy, Moses recounts that God told the Israelites to observe the Sabbath because the Lord liberated them from Egyptian bondage. So which is it? The traditional Jewish answer is that God uttered both versions simultaneously, but fallible human ears heard it two separate ways. So how can you post one version or the other and declare it the Ineffable Word of God? You can't.
Then there's the numbering problem—which is how the Eagles ended up with more than 10 commandments. [Close quote]
The forgoing was from NEWSWEEK, July 11, 2005, p. 58.
_______________________________________________
"Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil." —Carl Sagan in COSMOS
(In Spokane, of course, under our pedophile-Republican, orthodox-Christian Mayor West, library funds are sliced and hours squeezed next to nothing. Yessiree bob, these are truly conservative and fundamentalist times. What with cutting down the funding for CPB too, the only source of good scientific programming, you can see that Republicans have the goal of dumbing the population down until it is dumb and dumber than your average fundamentalist Christian and Moslem.)
SOME REAL STUFF FROM NEW ORLEANS
From our excellent local weekly, The Inlander, comes this story about what happened to a couple of people in New Orleans. You'll see the racism there, the racism which is the reason the Republicans now own the South and of which I've written frequently on this blog. The Democrats drove racists out of its party and the Republicans took them in and now they play the race card every time they need to win political races (think McCain and Oral Roberts University). The incidents described in the narrative I've linked to, when the trapped people try to escape from New Orleans and, later, on the bridge, are telling. That's the South, and that's the Republican party in its underpants.
Here's another interesting and recent scientific venture. Eve was the name given to the hypothetical first female in the human chain to modern man. She was discovered to have come from sub-Saharan Africa and lived about 200,000 years ago. It's quite clear and interesting what scientists did to determine when and where "Eve" lived.
Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and the late Allan Wilson of Berkeley drew blood samples from people in five geographic populations and analyzed them: ". . . . What they found at Berkeley was that their 147 samples differed by an average of 0.57 percent. How long would it take mankind's mitochondrial DNA to differ by that crucial half a percent? Well, the Berkeley people believe that this kind of DNA (which is different from the more popular nuclear DNA and is located not in the nucleus but in mitochondria, the energy producing organelles of the cell) mutates at a rate of 2 to 4 percent every million years. If you divide 2 and 4 percent by 0.57 percent you get 3.5 and 7, and if you divide a million years by 3.5 and 7 you get 142,500 to 285,000 years. The researchers concluded it would take that length of time to cause the differences in DNA that they noted in blood samples taken around the world. The median figure comes to 200,000 years ago—in the general time frame that fossil scientists like the Leakeys had hypothesized for the evolution of modern man from ape-man stock."
The scientists found that the sub-Saharan Africa samples had the most genetic mutations of any populations on Earth, "meaning the process [of mutation] had been going on longer in than African population than among the Chinese or Europeans or Australians." The deepest roots of humankind were, therefore, in Africa, the beginnings of humankind.
From an essay, "The Search For Eve" by Michael Brown in MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE, edited by William H. Shore, pp. 87-88.
Let me give a little boost to this book. It's a collection of essays by generalists in science and by scientists themselves which were collected together by the William Shore into a book which was then sold to benefit world hunger. This particular book was the second one put together for charitable purposes by Mr. Shore.
O, THOSE OLD BIBLE BLUES
Now you see them, all ten of them, then you don't. Some more Bible confusion in the source book itself. God sure was a mixed up cuss. Almost as if it/he/she didn't know its own mind. Over and over, not knowing it. . . .
[Open Quote] The complex textual history of the Commandments suggests that the more you study the Bible, the less certain you become of your ability to divine the precise Word of God. That's a useful lesson in this divided time.
Most public displays of the Ten Commandments, including the ones in Texas and Kentucky that the Supreme Court dealt with, are based on Exodus 20, verses 2-14, where God speaks directly to the Israelites. But if you grew up as I did, studying the Bible in its original Hebrew, you know that there's a second, equally valid version in Deuteronomy 5:6-18. And the two versions differ. In Exodus, God says to remember the Sabbath because he created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In Deuteronomy, Moses recounts that God told the Israelites to observe the Sabbath because the Lord liberated them from Egyptian bondage. So which is it? The traditional Jewish answer is that God uttered both versions simultaneously, but fallible human ears heard it two separate ways. So how can you post one version or the other and declare it the Ineffable Word of God? You can't.
Then there's the numbering problem—which is how the Eagles ended up with more than 10 commandments. [Close quote]
The forgoing was from NEWSWEEK, July 11, 2005, p. 58.
_______________________________________________
"Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil." —Carl Sagan in COSMOS
(In Spokane, of course, under our pedophile-Republican, orthodox-Christian Mayor West, library funds are sliced and hours squeezed next to nothing. Yessiree bob, these are truly conservative and fundamentalist times. What with cutting down the funding for CPB too, the only source of good scientific programming, you can see that Republicans have the goal of dumbing the population down until it is dumb and dumber than your average fundamentalist Christian and Moslem.)
SOME REAL STUFF FROM NEW ORLEANS
From our excellent local weekly, The Inlander, comes this story about what happened to a couple of people in New Orleans. You'll see the racism there, the racism which is the reason the Republicans now own the South and of which I've written frequently on this blog. The Democrats drove racists out of its party and the Republicans took them in and now they play the race card every time they need to win political races (think McCain and Oral Roberts University). The incidents described in the narrative I've linked to, when the trapped people try to escape from New Orleans and, later, on the bridge, are telling. That's the South, and that's the Republican party in its underpants.
Friday, September 09, 2005
OUR BUSY(BODIES) ARE THE RESULT OF EVOLUTIONARY CHANCE
The following three paragraphs are again from Sagan's COSMOS, a book which I just finished today, June 14, 2005 after several sessions of on and off reading, filling in with other books from time to time. What gets me about this passage is how easily I can slip into accepting what I am as if this skin that I walk the world in were the only possible skin to be in.
"Were the Earth to be started over again with all its physical features identical, it is extremely unlikely that anything closely resembling a human being would ever again emerge. There is a powerful random character to the evolutionary process. A cosmic ray striking a different gene, producing a different mutation, can have small consequences early but profound consequences late. Happenstance may play a powerful role in biology, as it does in history. The farther back the critical events occur, the more powerfully can they influence the present.
"For example, consider our hands. We have five fingers, including one opposable thumb. They serve us quite well. But I think we would be served equally well with six fingers including a thumb, or four fingers including a thumb, or maybe five fingers and two thumbs. There is nothing intrinsically best about our particular configuration of fingers, which we ordinarily think of as so natural and inevitable. We have five fingers because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had five phalanges or bones in its fins. Had we descended from a fish with four or six phalanges, we would have four or six fingers on each hand and would think them perfectly natural. We use base ten arithmetic only because we have ten fingers on our hands. Had the arrangement been otherwise, we would use base eight or base twelve arithmetic and relegate base ten to the New Math. The same point applies, I believe, to many more essential aspects of our being—our hereditary material, our internal biochemistry, our form, stature, organ systems, loves and hates, passions and despairs, tenderness and aggression, even our analytical processes—all of these are, at least in part, the result of apparently minor accidents in our immensely long evolutionary history.
"Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us."
THE FACTS JUST KEEP POURING IN. IT'S A MODERN DELUGE!
"Reading these two genomes side by side, it's amazing to see the evolutionary changes that are occurring. I couldn't imagine Darwin looking for stronger confirmation of his theories." —Univ. of Washington professor Robert Waterson, commenting on a study released last week that found humans and chimps have genetic blueprints that are 96 percent identical.
WAR WAS NEVER SO DANGEROUS AS IN "MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR"
Colleges in China are having trouble with their students having sex in the dorm, so they're cracking down. They're threatening to expel anyone who doesn't quit having sex in the dorms. They're no long offering free condoms. Trouble is, their students are, therefore, taking to the streets to have sex. In Beijing, they flock to a popular park and copulate on the lawn. Passersby call these couples "land mines". Be careful where you step. —from NEWSWEEK (September, 2005, p. 12)
THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED
It’s interesting science fiction to imagine how one might go back in time and alter current events, but when you search through history, you often find moments that changed history, though the events were mere coincidences. James Burke produced a wonderful PBS series about those kinds of connections in history when one thing led to another to a seemingly inevitable conclusion. He called it “The Day The Universe Changed”. In fact I’ve got the companion book to that series and will eventually begin reading it. But here, in COSMOS, on Sagan’s page 303, is a footnote:
“When La Perouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned own. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Perouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have been changed significantly.”
La Perouse was a French explorer who touched down in North America in Alaska. The rejected Bonaparte later conquered Egypt, and a French soldier, working on fortifications along the Nile, uncovered the Rosetta stone that Champollion later used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
ISN'T IT OBVIOUS
Bush gets elected, and then god strikes us with 9/11. But fundamentalists don't get the message. They re-elect the Pres. and keep the Republican congress strong. So now god gives us Katrina. Isn't it obvious the message we're getting from the fundamentalist god? What will happen after 2006 or 2008 if Republicans aren't turned out of office nationwide? Nuclear war????
____________________________________________
"Avarice is the sphincter of the heart." —Matthew Green
The following three paragraphs are again from Sagan's COSMOS, a book which I just finished today, June 14, 2005 after several sessions of on and off reading, filling in with other books from time to time. What gets me about this passage is how easily I can slip into accepting what I am as if this skin that I walk the world in were the only possible skin to be in.
"Were the Earth to be started over again with all its physical features identical, it is extremely unlikely that anything closely resembling a human being would ever again emerge. There is a powerful random character to the evolutionary process. A cosmic ray striking a different gene, producing a different mutation, can have small consequences early but profound consequences late. Happenstance may play a powerful role in biology, as it does in history. The farther back the critical events occur, the more powerfully can they influence the present.
"For example, consider our hands. We have five fingers, including one opposable thumb. They serve us quite well. But I think we would be served equally well with six fingers including a thumb, or four fingers including a thumb, or maybe five fingers and two thumbs. There is nothing intrinsically best about our particular configuration of fingers, which we ordinarily think of as so natural and inevitable. We have five fingers because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had five phalanges or bones in its fins. Had we descended from a fish with four or six phalanges, we would have four or six fingers on each hand and would think them perfectly natural. We use base ten arithmetic only because we have ten fingers on our hands. Had the arrangement been otherwise, we would use base eight or base twelve arithmetic and relegate base ten to the New Math. The same point applies, I believe, to many more essential aspects of our being—our hereditary material, our internal biochemistry, our form, stature, organ systems, loves and hates, passions and despairs, tenderness and aggression, even our analytical processes—all of these are, at least in part, the result of apparently minor accidents in our immensely long evolutionary history.
"Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us."
THE FACTS JUST KEEP POURING IN. IT'S A MODERN DELUGE!
"Reading these two genomes side by side, it's amazing to see the evolutionary changes that are occurring. I couldn't imagine Darwin looking for stronger confirmation of his theories." —Univ. of Washington professor Robert Waterson, commenting on a study released last week that found humans and chimps have genetic blueprints that are 96 percent identical.
WAR WAS NEVER SO DANGEROUS AS IN "MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR"
Colleges in China are having trouble with their students having sex in the dorm, so they're cracking down. They're threatening to expel anyone who doesn't quit having sex in the dorms. They're no long offering free condoms. Trouble is, their students are, therefore, taking to the streets to have sex. In Beijing, they flock to a popular park and copulate on the lawn. Passersby call these couples "land mines". Be careful where you step. —from NEWSWEEK (September, 2005, p. 12)
THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED
It’s interesting science fiction to imagine how one might go back in time and alter current events, but when you search through history, you often find moments that changed history, though the events were mere coincidences. James Burke produced a wonderful PBS series about those kinds of connections in history when one thing led to another to a seemingly inevitable conclusion. He called it “The Day The Universe Changed”. In fact I’ve got the companion book to that series and will eventually begin reading it. But here, in COSMOS, on Sagan’s page 303, is a footnote:
“When La Perouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned own. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Perouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have been changed significantly.”
La Perouse was a French explorer who touched down in North America in Alaska. The rejected Bonaparte later conquered Egypt, and a French soldier, working on fortifications along the Nile, uncovered the Rosetta stone that Champollion later used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
ISN'T IT OBVIOUS
Bush gets elected, and then god strikes us with 9/11. But fundamentalists don't get the message. They re-elect the Pres. and keep the Republican congress strong. So now god gives us Katrina. Isn't it obvious the message we're getting from the fundamentalist god? What will happen after 2006 or 2008 if Republicans aren't turned out of office nationwide? Nuclear war????
____________________________________________
"Avarice is the sphincter of the heart." —Matthew Green
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
TONIGHT, TODAY AND TOMORROW
All I know, as retired, I pass my days, I'm aware I still have so many books to read. They stretch out ahead of me for years. Fiction, biography, history, science. And classes to take. Tonight, all day, I feel so alive as my peers drop dead around me from 60 to 70. Just tonight, I watched American Masters presentation of Willa Cather and realized, there's another author I haven't experienced. Or have I? The life of the reader feels so distinct and separate from the rest of America. Whether that separateness is my imagination or a real thing I don't know. Do you?
J. F. KENNEDY'S FAVORITE TUNE: "BIG BAD JOHN?"
Studs Terkel in his book, TALKING TO MYSELF, pages 57-59, reports on a conversation he had with Ben Bradlee (the editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate affair and the Cuban Missile Crisis). He was shocked to learn that one of Kennedy's favorite tunes was "Big Bad John" and that he played it over and over while he was facing down the Russian dictator, Khrushchev. "Big Bad John" was a "tough hombre", sung about by Tennessee Ernie Ford, who "risks and loses his life to save his buddies."
[Open quote] "What would have happened had Khrushchev not turned back?" I ask in a tremolo, ex post facto. "We would have been in World War III," says Bradlee. "Because we were going to get 'em. There is no doubt in my mind."
High Noon, by God. I am slack-jawed; no words come forth. I shake my head like a baby's rattle; my jowls jiggle loosely. I am Cuddles Sakall, the avuncular Czech film comic. I smack away at my left ear to clear it of sea water.
We were going to get 'em. My guest has a reputation as a fighting, no-nonsense newspaperman. Justifiably. With understandable hesitancy, I ask, No alternative? Mr. Bradlee patiently explains. His is a comforting, blues in the night, Jason Robards baritone. But why am I not comforted? "I'm afraid if the President of the United States had said, in the face of the Soviet fleet steaming to Cuba with missiles, 'Hey, fellow, don't do that. I'll take my guys out of Turkey'— I'm afraid that would have been viewed as the all-time gutless, yellow . . ."
"It's that gutsy macho matter again," I mumble, half to myself.
"It's a little more than that. It wouldn't have worked in the climate of that time."
To a slow learner, Bradlee explains Kennedy's pragmatism. The President, it seems, was well aware of our double standard of behavior. "It was okay for us to have 27,000 troops in Turkey right on the Soviet border, but it was not okay to have Soviet troops ninety miles from the U.S. border. That didn't seem right to him. He had an inner debate, but he kept it quiet."
"Suppose he had made those doubts public, might not the missile crisis have been avoided?" My naiveté is, I'm afraid, too much for Mr. Bradlee.
"The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all," says the hard-hitting editor.
Maybe so. But why do my thoughts fly, higgledy-piggledy, to John Peter Altgeld? We remember this governor of Illinois, who in 1893 pardoned the surviving Haymarket riot defendants. He felt they had been framed. He spat into the prevailing winds. The Respectables were, of course, outraged. Altgeld was seemingly destroyed. But was he, really? He is remembered. Does anybody recall the name of his predecessor, a pragmatic governor who sent the others to the gibbet? Or the merchant princes of Chicago who damned Altgeld? They are not even footnotes. So much for pragmatism. Or, for that matter, so much for machismo. Need we ask ourselves who was the more gutsy of the two—John Fitzgerald Kennedy or John Peter Altgeld?
Meanwhile, back to reality. I mumble (listeners continually complain that they can hardly hear me), "It was a game of chicken. In Rusk's phrase, 'They blinked first.' "
Softly, Bradlee remembers, "Eyeball to eyeball."
My head is awhirl. I'm trying to picture what eyeball to eyeball looks like. All I can come up with is a Jules Feiffer cartoon. But why ain't I laughing?
I may not be as heavy as Herman Kahn, but I'm thinking the unthinkable, too. There is a difference. Kahn is brave and cool. I am craven and feverish. I find this strange, since there is so much more of him to be blown up than there is of me.
As one part of me is listening to my guest's straight-from-the shoulder talk, the other part is talking to myself. Suppose the stubborn Russian peasant, instead of turning back, had replied, Okay, I ain't blinkin'. Big Bad John, being Big Bad John, would have let 'em have it, by God. And what would the rest of us have? The rest of us and the rest of them. [Close quote]
I don't think it can be put any planer than Terkel has put it.
_______________________________________________
"If Roosevelt was alive today, he'd turn over in his grave." —Samual Goldwin
All I know, as retired, I pass my days, I'm aware I still have so many books to read. They stretch out ahead of me for years. Fiction, biography, history, science. And classes to take. Tonight, all day, I feel so alive as my peers drop dead around me from 60 to 70. Just tonight, I watched American Masters presentation of Willa Cather and realized, there's another author I haven't experienced. Or have I? The life of the reader feels so distinct and separate from the rest of America. Whether that separateness is my imagination or a real thing I don't know. Do you?
J. F. KENNEDY'S FAVORITE TUNE: "BIG BAD JOHN?"
Studs Terkel in his book, TALKING TO MYSELF, pages 57-59, reports on a conversation he had with Ben Bradlee (the editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate affair and the Cuban Missile Crisis). He was shocked to learn that one of Kennedy's favorite tunes was "Big Bad John" and that he played it over and over while he was facing down the Russian dictator, Khrushchev. "Big Bad John" was a "tough hombre", sung about by Tennessee Ernie Ford, who "risks and loses his life to save his buddies."
[Open quote] "What would have happened had Khrushchev not turned back?" I ask in a tremolo, ex post facto. "We would have been in World War III," says Bradlee. "Because we were going to get 'em. There is no doubt in my mind."
High Noon, by God. I am slack-jawed; no words come forth. I shake my head like a baby's rattle; my jowls jiggle loosely. I am Cuddles Sakall, the avuncular Czech film comic. I smack away at my left ear to clear it of sea water.
We were going to get 'em. My guest has a reputation as a fighting, no-nonsense newspaperman. Justifiably. With understandable hesitancy, I ask, No alternative? Mr. Bradlee patiently explains. His is a comforting, blues in the night, Jason Robards baritone. But why am I not comforted? "I'm afraid if the President of the United States had said, in the face of the Soviet fleet steaming to Cuba with missiles, 'Hey, fellow, don't do that. I'll take my guys out of Turkey'— I'm afraid that would have been viewed as the all-time gutless, yellow . . ."
"It's that gutsy macho matter again," I mumble, half to myself.
"It's a little more than that. It wouldn't have worked in the climate of that time."
To a slow learner, Bradlee explains Kennedy's pragmatism. The President, it seems, was well aware of our double standard of behavior. "It was okay for us to have 27,000 troops in Turkey right on the Soviet border, but it was not okay to have Soviet troops ninety miles from the U.S. border. That didn't seem right to him. He had an inner debate, but he kept it quiet."
"Suppose he had made those doubts public, might not the missile crisis have been avoided?" My naiveté is, I'm afraid, too much for Mr. Bradlee.
"The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all," says the hard-hitting editor.
Maybe so. But why do my thoughts fly, higgledy-piggledy, to John Peter Altgeld? We remember this governor of Illinois, who in 1893 pardoned the surviving Haymarket riot defendants. He felt they had been framed. He spat into the prevailing winds. The Respectables were, of course, outraged. Altgeld was seemingly destroyed. But was he, really? He is remembered. Does anybody recall the name of his predecessor, a pragmatic governor who sent the others to the gibbet? Or the merchant princes of Chicago who damned Altgeld? They are not even footnotes. So much for pragmatism. Or, for that matter, so much for machismo. Need we ask ourselves who was the more gutsy of the two—John Fitzgerald Kennedy or John Peter Altgeld?
Meanwhile, back to reality. I mumble (listeners continually complain that they can hardly hear me), "It was a game of chicken. In Rusk's phrase, 'They blinked first.' "
Softly, Bradlee remembers, "Eyeball to eyeball."
My head is awhirl. I'm trying to picture what eyeball to eyeball looks like. All I can come up with is a Jules Feiffer cartoon. But why ain't I laughing?
I may not be as heavy as Herman Kahn, but I'm thinking the unthinkable, too. There is a difference. Kahn is brave and cool. I am craven and feverish. I find this strange, since there is so much more of him to be blown up than there is of me.
As one part of me is listening to my guest's straight-from-the shoulder talk, the other part is talking to myself. Suppose the stubborn Russian peasant, instead of turning back, had replied, Okay, I ain't blinkin'. Big Bad John, being Big Bad John, would have let 'em have it, by God. And what would the rest of us have? The rest of us and the rest of them. [Close quote]
I don't think it can be put any planer than Terkel has put it.
_______________________________________________
"If Roosevelt was alive today, he'd turn over in his grave." —Samual Goldwin
Monday, September 05, 2005
ROMANTICS ARE JUST A BUNCH OF SADOMASOCHISTS—PAGLIA
"Penthesilea [a play by the German, Kleist] is a swirling vortex of sadomasochistic passions, each savagely devouring the next. Welcome to Late Romantic nature, created by Rousseau's benign over idealizations. Penthesilea can be read allegorically, as a descent into the poet's unconscious, where two parts of the psyche, masculine and feminine, fight for supremacy.
"The play's sexual personae have indeterminate boundaries, which are corrected and hardened by emotional, physical, and sexual assault. Penthesilea's dangerous expansion of self has historical causes. The failure of traditional hierarchies in the late eighteenth century removed social and philosophical limitations essential for happiness, security, and self-knowledge. Without external restrictions, there can be no self definition. The dissolution of hierarchical orders permitted personality to expand so suddenly that it went into a free fall of anxiety. Hence the self had to be chastened, its boundaries redefined, even by pain. The self must be reduced in size. This is the ultimate meaning of Penthesilea's erotics of mastectomy. Romanticism, swelling, contracts itself in Decadence. Mutilations and amputations belong to an aesthetics of subtraction, a pathological metaphysic in which the imagination reorients itself to the world by a surgical reduction of self. Sadomasochism will always appear in the freest times, in imperial Rome or the late twentieth century. It is a pagan ritual of riddance, stilling anxiety and fear." —Camille Paglia in SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 263
Paglia's idea that one needs "social and philosophical" limits by which he can test his own identity is a fascinating idea, but, as usual of late, too general for me. She blames hippy decadence on their being romantics who knew few limits. However, the first hippies I encountered in the Sixties when I taught high school one year were young men and women who had suffered from parents who practiced corporeal punishment or who were abusive in one way or another, and, in short, parents who set inconsistent boundaries or limits that were too severe or who were just plane not adept at being "good" parents, whatever a "good" parent is. For example, the chief pot dealer in the school where I taught turned out to be the son of a very fundamentalist Christian preacher.
The sad thing about the debate between punishers (conservatives) and nurturers (liberals) in current America is that, in our debates, we may forget that both actually want to help those who are outcasts. However, beneath that wish, is also the idea that some of us who are trying to help others are sometimes lost ourselves and in need of help. I've met far too many fundamentalist Christians who have no idea who they are and who are, therefore, very destructive people. Religious belief is no guarantee of sanity. Would you want your child raised by a Moslem suicide bomber? Personally, when I was younger, I felt myself very lost and struggling, and I had been raised by a restrictive Catholic stepmom who was abusive and a rager.
I think a rule of thumb for average Americans ought to be that when they run into people who are extreme in their beliefs, that extremity is the result of their not being balanced. But if that imbalance is the result of a culture not setting limits or the result of genetic makeup is a question still very much in debate. These days I put much more emphasis on genetic makeup and physical conditions than I do on culture and nurture. When Paglia wrote her book, we did not know as much about human genetics as we do now. Isn't that just like science—to make ideas obsolete right under our feet as we work at our beliefs?
WHILE BERATING SIXTIES HIPPIES EXCESS,
PAGLIA GIVES NO QUARTER TO CHRISTIANS EITHER
"Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity—evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship. There western man obsessively confronts what Christianity has never been able to bury or explain away. Horror stories ending in the victory of good are no more numerous than those ending in the threat of evil's return. Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave." —Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 268
ON THE OTHER HAND, IVY COMPTON-BURNETT SAYS. . .
But, speaking of morality, which is what the two previous segments are more or less about, Studs Terkel was interviewing Ivy Compton-Burnett (British novelist) back in October, 1962 (O, so long ago, almost like another age) when he asked her, "You never pass judgment, do you?"
He meant, in her books.
Ivy replied, "No. Some people say I'm amoral. In one of my books, I made a nasty woman do nasty things and I didn't have her punished at all. Some critics are disturbed: I don't make evil meet retribution. Why should I? It doesn't seem to meet it in life. I think crime pays on the whole, don't you?"
There is a twinkle in Ivy's eye, I believe, but I also believe that she's saying quite a truthful mouthful too, don't you? Think of Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" as another example of the possibility that one can get away with a crime under the right circumstances. Even though he and I think ""Stardust Memories" is one of his best works, I also put "Crimes and Misdemeanors" high up on my list of Woody's films. I know, it's just personal taste, but what isn't? "Stardust Memories", by the way, is Woody Allen's tribute to Federico Fellini. It's a takeoff on Fellini's "8 1/2".....
"Penthesilea [a play by the German, Kleist] is a swirling vortex of sadomasochistic passions, each savagely devouring the next. Welcome to Late Romantic nature, created by Rousseau's benign over idealizations. Penthesilea can be read allegorically, as a descent into the poet's unconscious, where two parts of the psyche, masculine and feminine, fight for supremacy.
"The play's sexual personae have indeterminate boundaries, which are corrected and hardened by emotional, physical, and sexual assault. Penthesilea's dangerous expansion of self has historical causes. The failure of traditional hierarchies in the late eighteenth century removed social and philosophical limitations essential for happiness, security, and self-knowledge. Without external restrictions, there can be no self definition. The dissolution of hierarchical orders permitted personality to expand so suddenly that it went into a free fall of anxiety. Hence the self had to be chastened, its boundaries redefined, even by pain. The self must be reduced in size. This is the ultimate meaning of Penthesilea's erotics of mastectomy. Romanticism, swelling, contracts itself in Decadence. Mutilations and amputations belong to an aesthetics of subtraction, a pathological metaphysic in which the imagination reorients itself to the world by a surgical reduction of self. Sadomasochism will always appear in the freest times, in imperial Rome or the late twentieth century. It is a pagan ritual of riddance, stilling anxiety and fear." —Camille Paglia in SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 263
Paglia's idea that one needs "social and philosophical" limits by which he can test his own identity is a fascinating idea, but, as usual of late, too general for me. She blames hippy decadence on their being romantics who knew few limits. However, the first hippies I encountered in the Sixties when I taught high school one year were young men and women who had suffered from parents who practiced corporeal punishment or who were abusive in one way or another, and, in short, parents who set inconsistent boundaries or limits that were too severe or who were just plane not adept at being "good" parents, whatever a "good" parent is. For example, the chief pot dealer in the school where I taught turned out to be the son of a very fundamentalist Christian preacher.
The sad thing about the debate between punishers (conservatives) and nurturers (liberals) in current America is that, in our debates, we may forget that both actually want to help those who are outcasts. However, beneath that wish, is also the idea that some of us who are trying to help others are sometimes lost ourselves and in need of help. I've met far too many fundamentalist Christians who have no idea who they are and who are, therefore, very destructive people. Religious belief is no guarantee of sanity. Would you want your child raised by a Moslem suicide bomber? Personally, when I was younger, I felt myself very lost and struggling, and I had been raised by a restrictive Catholic stepmom who was abusive and a rager.
I think a rule of thumb for average Americans ought to be that when they run into people who are extreme in their beliefs, that extremity is the result of their not being balanced. But if that imbalance is the result of a culture not setting limits or the result of genetic makeup is a question still very much in debate. These days I put much more emphasis on genetic makeup and physical conditions than I do on culture and nurture. When Paglia wrote her book, we did not know as much about human genetics as we do now. Isn't that just like science—to make ideas obsolete right under our feet as we work at our beliefs?
WHILE BERATING SIXTIES HIPPIES EXCESS,
PAGLIA GIVES NO QUARTER TO CHRISTIANS EITHER
"Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity—evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship. There western man obsessively confronts what Christianity has never been able to bury or explain away. Horror stories ending in the victory of good are no more numerous than those ending in the threat of evil's return. Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave." —Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 268
ON THE OTHER HAND, IVY COMPTON-BURNETT SAYS. . .
But, speaking of morality, which is what the two previous segments are more or less about, Studs Terkel was interviewing Ivy Compton-Burnett (British novelist) back in October, 1962 (O, so long ago, almost like another age) when he asked her, "You never pass judgment, do you?"
He meant, in her books.
Ivy replied, "No. Some people say I'm amoral. In one of my books, I made a nasty woman do nasty things and I didn't have her punished at all. Some critics are disturbed: I don't make evil meet retribution. Why should I? It doesn't seem to meet it in life. I think crime pays on the whole, don't you?"
There is a twinkle in Ivy's eye, I believe, but I also believe that she's saying quite a truthful mouthful too, don't you? Think of Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" as another example of the possibility that one can get away with a crime under the right circumstances. Even though he and I think ""Stardust Memories" is one of his best works, I also put "Crimes and Misdemeanors" high up on my list of Woody's films. I know, it's just personal taste, but what isn't? "Stardust Memories", by the way, is Woody Allen's tribute to Federico Fellini. It's a takeoff on Fellini's "8 1/2".....
Saturday, September 03, 2005
THE SOUTH HAS RIZ AGAIN!
I‘m going to make some huge generalizations here, but they shed some light on what’s going on in the South with Hurricane Katrina and what’s going on in the nation as a whole. The problem is Southern White males.
Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in the South is so bad because it has struck in the poorest part of our nation, the Bible Belt, in three of the states which make up the poorest part of our nation and are represented in a string of states like Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas. Florida is not like those others because so many of the white males in charge down there and the citizens who have moved down there are from the North. But as for the rest of the South, for more than 100 years, Southern White males have been psychological products of the Civil War with a loser’s mentality and a hatred of the “big government” that defeated them more than a hundred years ago which they represent as a big spender whose spending has gone mostly to help the undeserving and lazy poor.
Southern White male mentality and its leadership of the South have divided the South between the haves and have nots more clearly than in any other place in the Nation. Southern White males held back integration and the Democratic Party for years until they were purged from it by the Civil Rights movement. Now they control the Republican Party and, if you look at the leadership of the nation’s Federal Legislature, you’ll see that Southern White males currently dominate it and that they now are doing to the entire nation what they have done to South. They’re impoverishing their feared “big government” through tax credits for the rich which impoverishes the infrastructure which should be in place to help the poor of the South right now who are suffering worst of all. All over the nation, Southern creep is dividing the rich from the poor through the same policies that divide it in the South.
All you need do is pay attention to the cuts the Republicans have made in funds for the infrastructure which was protecting New Orleans, and you’ll see how this impoverishment has worked out in the South and will work out in the entire nation. Further, this trend has been going on since 1980 when Reagan came to power. Democrats have participated in it because they have had to rebalance budgets which the Southern White males have imbalanced by tax cuts which feed their poor man mentality and keep them wealthy at the expense of the real poor.
The Southern fundamentalist church leadership contributes to this impoverishing of America’s greatness by wanting Americans to be poor. Haven’t you and I both heard several times lately from Southern church leaders and TVangelists that it’s our wealth that makes bad things happen to us? It’s spoiled us and made us evil, greedy and weak? Do they mean to say, and I think they subconsciously do, that we ought to be poorer, then we’d all flock back to church?
Powerful Southern White males, influenced by this loser’s mentality and buttressed by the church in their secret fear that wealth is bad act and legislate in this impoverished way. In the South you can have money and power and still think like you’re impoverished, and a rich man who has the psychological fears of someone in poverty is not going to be generous with his wealth; he’s going to be stingy with it. That stinginess of White Southern males has impoverished way too many of the South’s citizens and, now, it’s doing the same thing to our mighty nation—dividing America between the poor and wealthy by starving government and by giving huge tax breaks to the rich. That way, they can go to heaven by thinking poor but still maintain wealth by thinking like selfish rich people. Not all wealthy people are selfish, just a lot of them are Southerners, and they do think that way.
I know this is a rough draft which I have just awakened at three in the morning to jot down, but I think Southern White males and the fundamentalist church which supports them are America’s weakest link in our struggle to remain afloat in a global economy. Spend some years looking these ideas over and see if you don’t come to some similar conclusions. When I was poorest and drunkest and most religious (I came from the South-influenced Southern Ohio), I hated the whole class of the wealthy and thought that money was evil, and I unconsciously did everything in my power not to be wealthy and not to succeed, and churchly ideas played their part in my impoverishment for the reasons I stated above. I didn’t want to be evil, did I?
GWB DOES IT AGAIN!
This joke floated into my possession via the mighty internet:
Heathrow Airport in England, a 300-foot red carpet was stretched out to Air Force One and President Bush strode to a warm but dignified handshake from Queen Elizabeth II.
They rode in a silver 1934 Bentley to the edge of central London where they boarded an open 17th century coach hitched to six magnificent white horses. As they rode toward Buckingham Palace, each looking to their side and waving to the thousands of cheering Britons lining the streets, all was going well. This was indeed a glorious display of pageantry and dignity.
Suddenly the scene was shattered when the right rear horse let rip the most horrendous, earth-shattering, eye-smarting blast of flatulence, and the coach immediately filled with noxious fumes. Uncomfortable, but maintaining control, the two dignitaries did their best to ignore the whole incident, but then the Queen decided that was a ridiculous manner with which to handle a most embarrassing situation.
She turned to Mr. Bush and explained, "Mr. President, please accept my regrets. I'm sure you understand that there are some things even a Queen cannot control."
George W., ever the Texas gentleman, replied, "Your Majesty, please don't give the matter another thought. You know, if you hadn't said something I would have assumed it was one of the horses."
___________________________________________________________
"Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face." —Dave Barry
I‘m going to make some huge generalizations here, but they shed some light on what’s going on in the South with Hurricane Katrina and what’s going on in the nation as a whole. The problem is Southern White males.
Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in the South is so bad because it has struck in the poorest part of our nation, the Bible Belt, in three of the states which make up the poorest part of our nation and are represented in a string of states like Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas. Florida is not like those others because so many of the white males in charge down there and the citizens who have moved down there are from the North. But as for the rest of the South, for more than 100 years, Southern White males have been psychological products of the Civil War with a loser’s mentality and a hatred of the “big government” that defeated them more than a hundred years ago which they represent as a big spender whose spending has gone mostly to help the undeserving and lazy poor.
Southern White male mentality and its leadership of the South have divided the South between the haves and have nots more clearly than in any other place in the Nation. Southern White males held back integration and the Democratic Party for years until they were purged from it by the Civil Rights movement. Now they control the Republican Party and, if you look at the leadership of the nation’s Federal Legislature, you’ll see that Southern White males currently dominate it and that they now are doing to the entire nation what they have done to South. They’re impoverishing their feared “big government” through tax credits for the rich which impoverishes the infrastructure which should be in place to help the poor of the South right now who are suffering worst of all. All over the nation, Southern creep is dividing the rich from the poor through the same policies that divide it in the South.
All you need do is pay attention to the cuts the Republicans have made in funds for the infrastructure which was protecting New Orleans, and you’ll see how this impoverishment has worked out in the South and will work out in the entire nation. Further, this trend has been going on since 1980 when Reagan came to power. Democrats have participated in it because they have had to rebalance budgets which the Southern White males have imbalanced by tax cuts which feed their poor man mentality and keep them wealthy at the expense of the real poor.
The Southern fundamentalist church leadership contributes to this impoverishing of America’s greatness by wanting Americans to be poor. Haven’t you and I both heard several times lately from Southern church leaders and TVangelists that it’s our wealth that makes bad things happen to us? It’s spoiled us and made us evil, greedy and weak? Do they mean to say, and I think they subconsciously do, that we ought to be poorer, then we’d all flock back to church?
Powerful Southern White males, influenced by this loser’s mentality and buttressed by the church in their secret fear that wealth is bad act and legislate in this impoverished way. In the South you can have money and power and still think like you’re impoverished, and a rich man who has the psychological fears of someone in poverty is not going to be generous with his wealth; he’s going to be stingy with it. That stinginess of White Southern males has impoverished way too many of the South’s citizens and, now, it’s doing the same thing to our mighty nation—dividing America between the poor and wealthy by starving government and by giving huge tax breaks to the rich. That way, they can go to heaven by thinking poor but still maintain wealth by thinking like selfish rich people. Not all wealthy people are selfish, just a lot of them are Southerners, and they do think that way.
I know this is a rough draft which I have just awakened at three in the morning to jot down, but I think Southern White males and the fundamentalist church which supports them are America’s weakest link in our struggle to remain afloat in a global economy. Spend some years looking these ideas over and see if you don’t come to some similar conclusions. When I was poorest and drunkest and most religious (I came from the South-influenced Southern Ohio), I hated the whole class of the wealthy and thought that money was evil, and I unconsciously did everything in my power not to be wealthy and not to succeed, and churchly ideas played their part in my impoverishment for the reasons I stated above. I didn’t want to be evil, did I?
GWB DOES IT AGAIN!
This joke floated into my possession via the mighty internet:
Heathrow Airport in England, a 300-foot red carpet was stretched out to Air Force One and President Bush strode to a warm but dignified handshake from Queen Elizabeth II.
They rode in a silver 1934 Bentley to the edge of central London where they boarded an open 17th century coach hitched to six magnificent white horses. As they rode toward Buckingham Palace, each looking to their side and waving to the thousands of cheering Britons lining the streets, all was going well. This was indeed a glorious display of pageantry and dignity.
Suddenly the scene was shattered when the right rear horse let rip the most horrendous, earth-shattering, eye-smarting blast of flatulence, and the coach immediately filled with noxious fumes. Uncomfortable, but maintaining control, the two dignitaries did their best to ignore the whole incident, but then the Queen decided that was a ridiculous manner with which to handle a most embarrassing situation.
She turned to Mr. Bush and explained, "Mr. President, please accept my regrets. I'm sure you understand that there are some things even a Queen cannot control."
George W., ever the Texas gentleman, replied, "Your Majesty, please don't give the matter another thought. You know, if you hadn't said something I would have assumed it was one of the horses."
___________________________________________________________
"Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face." —Dave Barry
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