WHEN AN ANTI-CHOICE WOMAN FINDS SHE MUST CHOOSE CHOICE

This is a long one and comes from the website of a Cincinnati, Ohio woman's clinic. I got it while cruising through some blogspots of people who expressed an interest in the movie, Gummo.

When the Anti-Choice Choose
By Joyce Arthur Copyright © September, 2000

Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women— abortion.

In the spring of 2000, I collected the following anecdotes directly from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe. The stories are presented in the providers' own words, with minor editing for grammar, clarity, and brevity. Names have been omitted to protect privacy.

"I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago. During her whole stay at the clinic, we felt that she was not quite right, but there were no real warning bells. She insisted that the abortion was her idea and assured us that all was OK. She went through the procedure very smoothly and was discharged with no problems. A quite routine operation. Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers." (Physician, Australia)

"I've had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, 'You're not going to tell them, are you!?' When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn't want this to interfere with it." (Physician, Texas)

"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'" (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)

"We too have seen our share of anti-choice women, ones the counselors usually grit their teeth over. Just last week a woman announced loudly enough for all to hear in the recovery room, that she thought abortion should be illegal. Amazingly, this was her second abortion within the last few months, having gotten pregnant again within a month of the first abortion. The nurse handled it by talking about all the carnage that went on before abortion was legalized and how fortunate she was to be receiving safe, professional care. However, this young woman continued to insist it was wrong and should be made illegal. Finally the nurse said, 'Well, I guess we won't be seeing you here again, not that you're not welcome.' Later on, another patient who had overheard this exchange thanked the nurse for her remarks." (Clinic Administrator, Alberta)

"We saw a woman recently who after four attempts and many hours of counseling both at the hospital and our clinic, finally, calmly and uneventfully, had her abortion. Four months later, she called me on Christmas Eve to tell me that she was not and never was pro-choice and that we failed to recognize that she was clinically depressed at the time of her abortion. The purpose of her call was to chastise me for not sending her off to the psych unit instead of the procedure room." (Clinic Administrator, Alberta)

"Recently, we had a patient who had given a history of being a 'pro-life' activist, but who had decided to have an abortion. She was pleasant to me and our initial discussion was mutually respectful. Later, she told someone on my staff that she thought abortion is murder, that she is a murderer, and that she is murdering her baby. So before doing her procedure, I asked her if she thought abortion is murder -- the answer was yes. I asked her if she thought I am a murderer, and if she thought I would be murdering her baby, and she said yes. But murder is a crime, and murderers are executed. Is this a crime? Well, it should be, she said. At that point, she became angry and hostile, and the summary of the conversation was that she regarded me as an abortion-dispensing machine, and how dare I ask her what she thinks. After explaining to her that I do not perform abortions for people who think I am a murderer or people who are angry at me, I declined to provide her with medical care. I do not know whether she found someone else to do her abortion." (Physician, Colorado)

"In 1973, after Roe v. Wade, abortion became legal but had to be performed in a hospital. That of course was changed later. For the first 'legal abortion day' I had scheduled five procedures. While scrubbing between cases, I was accosted by the Chief of the OB/Gyn service. He asked me, 'How many children are you going to kill today?' My response, out of anger, was a familiar vulgar retort. About three months later, this born-again Christian called me to explain that he was against abortion but his daughter was only a junior in high school and was too young to have a baby and he was also afraid that if she did have a baby she would not want to put it up for adoption. I told him he did not need to explain the situation to me. 'All I need to know', I said, 'is that SHE wants an abortion.' Two years later I performed a second abortion on her during her college break. She thanked me and pleaded, 'Please don't tell my dad, he is still anti-abortion.'" (Physician, Washington State)

"The sister of a Dutch bishop in Limburg once visited the abortion clinic in Beek where I used to work in the seventies. After entering the full waiting room she said to me, 'My dear Lord, what are all those young girls doing here?' 'Same as you', I replied. 'Dirty little dames,' she said." (Physician, The Netherlands)

"I had a patient about ten years ago who traveled up to New York City from South Carolina for an abortion. I asked her why she went such a long way to get the procedure. Her answer was that she was a member of a church group that didn't believe in abortion and she didn't want anyone to know she was having one. She planned to return to the group when she went back to South Carolina." (Physician, New York)

"I once had a German client who greatly thanked me at the door, leaving after a difficult 22-week abortion. With a gleaming smile, she added: 'Und doch sind Sie ein Mörderer.' ('And you're still a murderer.')" (Physician, The Netherlands)

"My first encounter with this phenomenon came when I was doing a 2-week follow-up at a family planning clinic. The woman's anti-choice values spoke indirectly through her expression and body language. She told me that she had been offended by the other women in the abortion clinic waiting room because they were using abortion as a form of birth control, but her condom had broken so she had no choice! I had real difficulty not pointing out that she did have a choice, and she had made it! Just like the other women in the waiting room." (Physician, Ontario)

"A 21 year old woman and her mother drove three hours to come to their appointment for an abortion. They were surprised to find the clinic a 'nice' place with friendly, personable staff. While going over contraceptive options, they shared that they were Pro-Life and disagreed with abortion, but that the patient could not afford to raise a child right now. Also, she wouldn't need contraception since she wasn't going to have sex until she got married, because of her religious beliefs. Rather than argue with them, I saw this as an opportunity for dialogue, and in the end, my hope was that I had planted a 'healing seed' to help resolve the conflict between their beliefs and their realities." (Physician, Washington State)

"I had a 37 year old woman just yesterday who was 13 weeks. She said she and her husband had been discussing this pregnancy for 2-3 months. She was strongly opposed to abortion, 'but my husband is forcing me to do it.' Naturally, I told her that no one could force her into an abortion, and that she had to choose whether the pregnancy or her husband were more important. I told her I only wanted what was best for her, and I would not do the abortion unless she agreed that it was in her best interest. Once she was faced with actually having to voice her own choice, she said 'Well, I made the appointment and I came here, so go ahead and do it. It's what's best.' At last I think she came to grips with the fact that it really was her decision after all." (Physician, Nevada)

"We have anti-choice women in for abortions all the time. Many of them are just naive and ignorant until they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Many of them are not malicious. They just haven't given it the proper amount of thought until it completely affects them. They can be judgmental about their friends, family, and other women. Then suddenly they become pregnant. Suddenly they see the truth. That it should only be their own choice. Unfortunately, many also think that somehow they are different than everyone else and they deserve to have an abortion, while no one else does." (Physician, Washington State)

Although few studies have been made of this phenomenon, a study done in 1981 (1) found that 24% of women who had abortions considered the procedure morally wrong, and 7% of women who'd had abortions disagreed with the statement, "Any woman who wants an abortion should be permitted to obtain it legally." A 1994/95 survey (2,3) of nearly 10,000 abortion patients showed 18% of women having abortions are born-again or Evangelical Christians. Many of these women are likely anti-choice. The survey also showed that Catholic women have an abortion rate 29% higher than Protestant women. A Planned Parenthood handbook on abortion notes that nearly half of all abortions are for women who describe themselves as born-again Christian, Evangelical Christian, or Catholic. (4)

According to a 1987 article, Abortion Clinics' Toughest Cases,(5) "Physicians and clinics frequently terminate pregnancies for women who believe abortion is 'murder' and 'a sin' but who are not anti-abortion activists. Demonstrators, organizers, and leaders in the [anti-abortion] movement are seen less frequently, ranging from perhaps once or twice a month to a few times in the course of a professional career." The article contained the following anecdotes:

An administrator at a Missouri clinic recalled a woman blurting out in the recovery room, "It should be illegal." The other women's mouths fell open, said the administrator. "They couldn't believe it."

The medical director of an Indianapolis clinic recalled one prospective patient who phoned to ask whether the clinic had a back door. He said no. How, she asked, could she get inside without being seen by fellow picketers outside? Pointing out that two orthopedists practiced with him, the doctor told the woman "she could limp and say she was coming to see the orthopods."

The medical director at a Dallas abortion clinic told this story: A white woman from an affluent north Dallas neighborhood brought her black maid in for an abortion and paid for it. While the maid was in a counseling session, a commotion was heard in the waiting room outside. The maid's employer was handing out anti-abortion leaflets to other women waiting for abortions.

From a clinic director in a mid-western state: "One of the most remarkable cases was a woman who came [from another part of the state] and said she was the Right-to-Life president in her county. 'But,' she said, she 'had become pregnant and had to have an abortion.'"

From a counselor in Virginia: "[The patient] was disturbed and upset and insisted she couldn't carry the pregnancy to term. She opposed abortion -- and in fact had picketed this very clinic -- [but] felt the abortion was something she had to do."

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique—not like those "other" women—even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call "sluts" and "trash." Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for "convenience".

A few behave in a very hostile manner, such as calling clinic staff "murderers." Years ago, a clinic counselor in British Columbia told me that one of her patients went into the procedure room apparently fine with her decision to have an abortion. During the abortion, at a stage when it was too late to stop the procedure, the woman started screaming "You murderers!" and other invectives at everyone in the room.

A few doctors actually refuse to provide abortions to anti-choice women for liability reasons. In the words of a Kansas physician:

"Early in my career, I thought I was obligated to provide an abortion for every woman who arrived at my doorstep requesting an abortion. My experience in general medicine, surgery, and abortion has led me to believe differently. Not inadvertently, women give either me or my staff an uneasy feeling about their ambivalence or their anxiety about the abortion process. Since I have never been sued for an abortion I did not perform, my policy is to acknowledge my gut feeling, which is more often right than wrong."

A clinic counselor from Georgia stated:
"I have long felt that anti-abortionism is a psychological contraindication to the abortion procedure. And that we don't have to give everyone who asks an abortion. An anti-abortion woman is likely to be uncooperative and will probably not follow post-op instructions or instructions on how to deal with complications. There is actually a case where an anti-abortion patient failed to go as directed to Emergency for an unrelated complication. She ended up dying, and her family sued the physician and badgered him publicly. Additionally, if you have a complication that day, it will be the anti-abortionist. I'm not talking about the patient who says, 'I was against abortion until it happened to me', or 'I'm really against abortion, but I have to do this'. I'm talking about the picketer, the activist, the totally anti-creature who will come back to haunt us."

In fact, an anti-abortion organization called Life Dynamics Inc., of Denton Texas, specializes in malpractice suits against abortion providers. They advertise for and exploit women who regret their abortion decision or who had complications, and try and persuade them to file suit against the doctor or clinic. Many of these women are vulnerable and suffer from emotional problems, but others are anti-abortion, or at least very ambivalent about their decision to have an abortion. The message that abortion is murder has had a profound influence on them, and it may leave them with a legacy of guilt and shame after their abortion, too often borne alone and in silence. When these women find themselves unable to cope with their abortions, they may look for somebody else to blame, and doctors become a convenient scapegoat.

At times, clinic staff understandably become frustrated and angry when they have to deal with abusive, hostile, or hypocritical patients. And it is rare for anti-choice women to express appreciation for the service they've received. But most clinics perform abortions on anti-abortion women because they feel it's their obligation to help all women. They provide more thorough and specialized counseling to these women to ensure they take ownership of their decision, as far as possible. Here's a couple of examples of counseling techniques:

"When a patient comes in with my 'favorite' sentiment: 'The only moral abortion is my abortion,' I try to expand her understanding that a few more of us have had and deserve a 'moral' abortion. When a woman expands her need for care beyond herself, you no longer have an 'anti'." (Clinic Administrator, Louisiana)

"Sometimes I say to patients who have that 'I have no choice, I know I'll regret it, just do me' attitude: 'You may not care, but we do. We only do abortions on women who want our services. We will not knowingly contribute to any possible trauma of any woman.' They seem surprised that we care how we do our work, but they also accept it." (Counselor, New York)

Some anti-choice women who have abortions do make peace with their decision and even become pro-choice, or at least more forgiving of other women seeking abortions. A Louisiana patient who was anti-choice before her abortion, wrote a warm and grateful thank-you letter to the clinic, admitting that she had been a hypocrite:

"I never dreamed, in my wildest nightmares, that there would ever be a situation where I personally would choose such an act. Of course, we would each like to think that our reasons for a termination are the exception to the rule. But the bottom line is that you people spend your lives, reputations, careers and energy fighting for, maintaining, and providing an option that I needed, while I spent my energy lambasting you. Yet you still allowed me to make use of your services even though I had been one of your enemies. You treated us as kindly and warmly as you did all of your patients and never once pointed an 'I told you so' finger in our direction. I got the impression that you cared equally about each woman in the facility and what each woman was going through, regardless of her reasons for choosing the procedure. I have never met a group of purely non-judgmental people like yourselves."

On occasion, an abortion turns out to be a momentous, life-affirming experience for an anti-choice woman. A doctor from a northwestern state shared the following personal story with me:

"I was born into a very Catholic family, and was politically pro-life during college. After dating my first real boyfriend for three years, we broke up, and the day my boyfriend moved out, I discovered I was pregnant. It was an agonizing decision, and something I never thought I would do, but I decided an abortion was the only realistic option. Thanks to Planned Parenthood counseling, I worked through some very tough conflicts within myself. I had to learn that my decision was a loving one. That 'my god' was actually a loving and supportive god. And that men don't have to make this decision, only women do. That it is a very personal, individual decision. I had to own it. I became much more compassionate towards myself and others as a result of my experience. Two years later I began medical school. When it came time to choose a practice, an abortion clinic opportunity came up. In working there, I began to feel that this was my calling. Having been in my patients' shoes, and coming from an unforgiving background, I could honestly say to patients, 'I know how you feel.' Deciding to have an abortion was THE hardest decision I've ever made in my life. Yet it has brought me the greatest transformation, fulfillment, and now joy. I am a more loving person because of it, and a better doctor for having experienced it. I love the work that I do, and the opportunity to support women seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy. My patients and my work are life's gifts to me, and I think my compassion and support are my gifts in return."

1. Henshaw, S.K. and G. Martire. 1982. Abortion and the Public Opinion Polls: 1. Morality and Legality. Family Planning Perspectives. 14:2, pp 53-60, March/April.
2. The Alan Guttmacher Institute. 1996. Abortion Common Among All Women, Even Those Thought to Oppose Abortion. http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/archives/prabort2.html
3. Henshaw, S.K. and K. Kost. 1996. Abortion Patients in 1994-1995: Characteristics and Contraceptive Use. Family Planning Perspectives. 28:4, July/August. http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/2814096.html
4. Planned Parenthood of America. Pro-Choice Debate Handbook. http://www.plannedparenthood.org/politicalarena/Pro-Choice_Debate_Handbook.html#4
5. Medical World News. 1987. Abortion Clinic's Toughest Cases. pp 55-61. March 9.

ESTONIAN WOMAN

A woman of mystery and color who seems to enjoy life, but that is all we know.
Click on "Imagine this" (see I LIKE) and flow and dance in color and joy.

CATHOLICS STILL SEEING THEMSELVES AS ATHEISTS. . . I GUESS

Awhile back, in a Newsweek article, Chris Dickey quoted from Catholicism’s Concilium something which is unfair and untrue, yet something which I have often heard charged by Christians of all stripes, that is, that fascists of the past are atheists. I replied quickly to Newsweek as you can see below.

From: George Thomas
To: Newsweek

Dear Editors,

Dickey’s article on the new Pope troubled me in one area. He quoted Concilium, journal of theology: “Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology. . . .”

Hitler was a Christian. So was Mussolini.

Look, I know that Dickey was only quoting a propaganda tool of the Vatican, but as an atheist I must protest that Fascism, born in nations jamb-packed with Catholics and Lutherans, was fully an outgrowth of the tyrannous spirit which resides in that Christian book, the Bible, in which not one democracy raises it’s lovely head. Fascism was and is the product of deeply religious people who still pray daily to live in a tyrannous kingdom for all of eternity after they die. They worship a tyrannous king who killed their hypothetical forebearer for the sin of exercising free will and thus show their contempt for free will by worshiping that very being who supposedly makes amends for his unjust killing by killing his own son. Now what sense does such a fairy tale make in a democracy?

Show me in the world at this time any war or trouble which is not caused by people who believe in god. The increasingly atheistic, peaceful European peoples ought to be praised to high mountains for their strong atheistic and democratic spirit which does honor free will by the very act of supporting democracies over books about hypothetical spiritual kings and princes.

A FIGURE FROM INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

I have no idea what kind of male the women who read this blog, if any, would prefer, but I can't just go on putting beautiful women in here, so here's a model from Interview magazine with the old Shiek of Araby look, the very eyes. Is that pleasing?














SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO NEED ETHICS

The Bushite White House recently ordered all staffers to take an ethics training course according to Newsweek (Nov. 28, 2005). My question, of course, just has to be why do conservative Republicans, Christians mightily, need an ethics course? Isn’t their Bible enough of an ethics course? And if not, why do they want us all to read it? Ethics, of course, comes to us liberals naturally. And please don’t bring up Clinton. After all, he told everyone that in order to win office, he had to move toward the center, toward the Republican right. Doesn’t that explain why he had some difficulty with ethics? Ahem. Come on back to the left, Bill. We’re waiting with open arms.

GRETCHEN MOL: SPEAKING BEAUTY TO POWER

A
little
beauty
before
the ugliness
of the
Bush
administration.















BUSHITES LEAD US ON A MERRY CHASE AROUND THE KENNEL
MCCAIN SHOWS THEM FOR WHAT THEY ARE

I have been working so many months ahead, getting my posts together, that some of the news items in them are falling pretty far behind times (as far back as last year), but here’s some more about Bush’s lies and deceptions of the American people.

(November 22, 2005) we hear that Europe is in an uproar over having discovered that American CIA operatives are kidnapping and holding in secret European citizens. Some bits and pieces out of the most recent NEWSWEEK should add to any decent American’s fear that we have gone mightily wrong by electing and reelecting this criminal bunch in the White House and Congress. Of course, if they could do all this, perhaps they did steal Florida in 2000 and Ohio in ‘04. Maybe they weren’t elected.

From Newsweek, November 21, 2005:

“At one point the Bush administration told the CIA it couldn’t be prosecuted for any [torture] technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies “organ failure” or “death”. (p. 28)

About America’s standing in the world community, John McCain said, “It’s killing us. It’s killing us.” (p. 28)

But, you know? McCain is an awfully conservative fellow, and he’s stood behind these Republican dudes even though they trashed his reputation in the 2000 race with lies and innuendoes in South Carolina. Perhaps, there’s a little deal going on between him and the Bushites. Maybe, they’ve given him the go ahead to sort of argue with them over torture so that he’ll be elected and carry on their trashing of the poor, the mentally ill, the aged, the working poor, the working homeless poor and continue building an increase (with tax cuts) of the gap between the rich and the poor which is as bad as it’s been since before Roosevelt. I’d trust him a whole lot more if he’d completely disengage himself from the Republican Party.

On page 30 we read, “Sending a suspect off to languish (and possibly be abused) in the prison of a foreign country is called a 'rendition.' The CIA has done numerous renditions over the years, usually not for the purpose of seeing suspected terrorists subjected to torture, but just to get them off the street while the agency follows up leads from captured documents, laptop computers and the like. In the case of al-Libi, however, the Bush administration was only too glad to make use of the 'take' from al-Libi's interrogation, helpfully provided by Egyptian intelligence. Under questioning by the Egyptian authorities (techniques unknown, but not hard to imagine), al-Libi confessed that Al Qaeda terrorists, beginning in December 2000, had gone to Iraq to learn about chemical and biological weapons. This was just the evidence the Bush administration needed to make the case for invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In his famous, now discredited speech to the United Nations in February 2003, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the intelligence extracted from al-Libi, referring to him not by name but as a 'senior Al Qaeda terrorist' who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.

“There was only one problem with al-Libi's story: after the Powell presentation, he recanted it. Overlooking timely doubts raised by some U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ideologues in the Bush administration had used information obtained by torture to mislead the world.”

On page 32: “In the summer of 2003, Rumsfeld sent a get-tough commander from Guantanamo—Lt. Gen. Geoffrey Miller—to ‘Gitmoize’ the interrogation techniques in Iraq.” Remember? We’ve already heard about his arrival at Abu Ghraib and the dog collars and what have you which immediately arrived with him. The commander of the average soldiers who guarded the prisoners, the only general to be demoted, has written a book about the general from Guantanamo and her concerns expressed to him about the illegality of some of what he was suggesting. Why hasn’t he been demoted?

How about this? Cheney’s new aide, Addington, who replaced the traitorous crook, Libby, was described by one Pentagon official like this: he “would like us to be able to pull fingernails with pliers.” p. 33

So much for the kind of men Cheney likes to have around him.

Finally, again, from a McCain piece in Newsweek, p. 36, I quote: “It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances than to lower our standards to accommodate a remote contingency, confusing personnel in the field and sending precisely the wrong message abroad about America's purposes and practices.

“The state of Israel, no stranger to terrorist attacks, has faced this dilemma, and in 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court declared cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment illegal. ‘A democratic, freedom-loving society,’ the court wrote, ‘does not accept that investigators use any means for the purpose of uncovering truth. The rules pertaining to investigators are important to a democratic state. They reflect its character.’

I’ve been asked ofter where did the brave men I was privileged to serve with in North Vietnam draw the strength to resist to the best of their abilities the cruelties inflicted on them by our enemies. They drew strength from their faith in each other, from their faith in God and from their faith in our country. Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them unto death. But every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them. That faith was indispensable not only to our honor but to our attempts to return home with honor. For without our honor, our homecoming would have had little value to us.

“The enemies we fight today hold our liberal [sic, that’s right, ‘liberal’ values] in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are - stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.

“Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country's honor to prevail; that they are always—through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss—they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.”

OKAY, JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT

Getting ahead of myself in these postings. I used to have a great crush on Ava, specially as she appeared in her role in the film based on Hemingway's short story, "Snows of Kilimanjoro," and in "The Barefoot Countessa". She was a real broad, a real dame, and when I read her autobiography that she was a dame came through loud and clear. And I really liked that. Even as she got older, her dameness shone through the prose. She wasn't afraid of aging and let it all hang out, joking about a hot day in Europe, I think, and having to sit down under a tree because she and her female companion ran out of breath just trying to walk across a field, and she shaded that with thoughts about the beauty she once was, and she had a good laugh.





EVIL SEES AS EVIL DOES

Speaking of hot women: it probably needs a woman to take George out to the woodshed, so read what Madeleine Albright has to say about George seeing the world in black and white, good versus evil. Go you girl!
Read Albright in LA Times

YEAH! ME TOO!

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: THE WHOLE SORDID PROLOGUE

Here's another book I've begun after recently finishing The Ancestor's Tale and Kate Remembered. Also I'm reading in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, a fine book that supports a lot of my claims that we're all just a bunch of sophisticated robots, but just now, I'm scanning you the entire prologue to a book called Blinded By the Right, written by David Brock. Maybe you remember him. He's the young man who was seduced by the conservatives while in Berkeley and who began to work for them until the lying, the cheating, the ruination of careers that conservatives called on him to do, shook him back to his idealistic, youthful roots. I think he now heads up an outfit called Media Matters. Returned to his good senses, he has written this book. I hope he got rich in the doing of it. I hope you'll look it up in your local library and give it a thorough read or, better yet, buy a copy and read it.

[Open quote.] This is a terrible book. It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power.

My story is about those familiar corrupting influences of ambition, greed, and ego. It is about how human weakness, lack of confidence, and emotional discomposure can lead to a susceptibility to manipulation for bad ends. It is also about the dangers of zeal and extremism in a political cause, and about how one can be blinded to the ethics of one's own actions.

I came to Washington in 1986 as a conservative rebel from Berkeley, California, and from that moment through the latter part of the l990s, as the leading right-wing scandal reporter, I was a witness to, and a participant in, all of the scandals that gripped the capital city—Iran-Contra, the failed nominatiOn of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, the Thomas-Hill hearings, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Whitewater, and the secret scheming that led to the impeachment of President Clinton. The conservative culture I thrived in was characterized by corrosive partisanship, visceral hatreds, and unfathomable hypocrisy. I worked for leading institutions of the conservative movement—the Washington Times, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Spectator—where I fought on the wrong side of an ideological and cultural war that divided our country and poisoned our politics.

The process of breaking ranks from a tight-knit political movement has been slow and torturous. The break came not in one decisive moment, but in a series of revelations great and small, about the character and actions of those who were my friends, about my own character and actions, and ultimately about the fanatical cause behind it all. There were times when I was not sure I would live through it to tell this story.

In the 1940s and 1950s, ex-Communist intellectuals created a literary genre documenting their break with Communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, so many liberals became conservatives that a new movement— neoconservatism—was born. Few have traveled in my direction, from conservatism to liberalism, at least publicly. It is the nature of an ideological defection such as mine to be a lone voice, met by denials or silence from my ex-comrades. Only they and I really know what we did and why we did it.

Though I do not know if these wrongs can ever be righted, in this or any other way, I wrote this book as an act of conscience, to correct the public record on events in which I played a central role and to illuminate for others the dangers that I see in an empowered conservative movement. How a man won a Supreme Court seat that I later learned he should never have won, how a lavishly funded campaign of political terrorism and propaganda disabled a presidency—these are events that may seem to perhaps everyone but me as if they happened a lifetime ago. But the wounds on the body politic from this era are still open. In the course of events that I describe in this book, the bad guys often won and justice was not always done. Many of the same forces, and many of the same players, still exert influence—a payback scheme in which old misdeeds are now being rewarded.

Twice as I tried to put this book to press, I was interrupted with official inquiries into the activities of my former associates. Several months ago, Theodore Olson, perhaps the top Republican lawyer in the country and the man who successfully argued the Bush v. Gore case for the Bush forces that won Bush the election, was nominated to be solicitor general of the United States. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Olson denied involvement in the American Spectator's Arkansas Project, a $2.4-million dirt digging operation against the Clintons funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. As a four year veteran of the Spectator, I was contacted by the Judiciary committee, and I described what I knew firsthand about Olson's integral role in the project, contradicting his sworn testimony.

While working on Blinded By the Right for the past three years, I stayed out of the news and used the time to attempt to find a sense of peace, emotional balance, and personal integrity that had eluded me during my dozen years in the right wing. I had no plan or desire to speak against Olson's nomination; I was simply answering questions. But when I did, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr fanned out in the press to vouch for Olson's character, and the virulent right-wing scandal machine, which my own reporting for the Spectator had done much to create back in the early 1990s, went into overdrive to besmirch me. Internet gossip Matt Drudge put up his flashing red sirens and claimed breathlessly that he had obtained a bootlegged copy of this book: "Brock Plans Scorched Earth; Book Outlines Reporter's Rise and Fall in Washington; Threatens Lawsuit Against Drudge." The trouble with Drudge's item was that he didn't have the book.

My last book, a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton published in 1996, had been widely expected to be as vicious as my first book, my 1993 expose on Anita Hill, The Real Anita Hill. [By the way—this book is some more about the scorching attack on Anita Hill that conservatives got themselves up to.] When the Hillary book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, turned out not to be vicious, the right wing was enraged. Now, prompted by my statements about Olson, Norah Vincent, who had been an editor at the publishing house that brought out Seduction, wrote on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, "If the world ended tomorrow and good and evil fought it out for keeps, I imagine that David Brock would be one of the devil's chief recruits." Lucianne Goldberg, the sometime literary agent and chief provocateur of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, called me a "turncoat twinkie" and suggested that the right wing had blackmail photographs of me.

If the senators believed my account, then Olson was seen to have given false and misleading testimony under oath. Despite my own checkered past, forty-seven Democratic senators voted against Olson based primarily on my eyewitness report. He was narrowly confirmed.

Such is the world I live in.

In August 2001, the Los Angeles Times called, looking for information on another Bush nominee, Terry Wooten, who had been tapped as a federal district judge. While writing The Real Anita Hill in the early 1990s, I searched for the confidential FBI file of Angela Wright, a damaging witness who said she was harassed by Clarence Thomas but never testified, in an effort to smear and discredit her. Wooten, the Republican chief counsel, gave me the file. I gave an interview to the Times about Wooten's illegal leaking, and I filed an affidavit with the Judiciary committee swearing to what had happened. When Wooten appeared before the Judiciary committee for his Senate confirmation in August 2001, he flatly denied giving me the FBI file. One of us had committed perjury.

A few weeks later, in late September, I sat across my dining room table from two FBI agents who interviewed me about Wooten and the Wright FBI file. I told them everything I knew about that tawdry episode. The FBI investigation concluded that while I had obtained confidential FBI material, the evidence against Wooten was not definitive, and Wooten was eventually confirmed. Yet regardless of the outcome, I was a witness to these events, and, as in the case of Olson, I believe there is something salutary to be gained simply by speaking and writing about them honestly.

With the security threats to the nation, which were years in the making, now so painfully obvious, a decade's worth of scandalmongering by the right appears all the more outrageously disgraceful. As the tragedy ushered in a new appreciation of the role of government, the government-hating project of the radical right seemed to suffer a tremendous setback. Yet there was no denying that even in a grave national crisis, some on the hard right did not for a moment suspend their dedication to a zealously intolerant, hate-filled, religious-based ideology.

It was sickening to see conservative commentator Ann Coulter call on America to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity"; or to hear the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the terrorist attacks on people who are pro-choice, gay and lesbian, or members of the American Civil Liberties Union; or to learn that conservative writer Michael Ledeen had pinned the death of Barbara Olson, a conservative pundit who perished, tragically, during the attack on the Pentagon, on the feminist establishment; or to read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page an opportunistic recommendation that the Bush administration use the crisis to push through another tax cut and confirm right-wing judges.

The need to shine light on the operations and agenda of the right wing has not abated in the wake of September 11. My intention is that the following political testament, offered in a spirit of both full disclosure and reconciliation, will serve as a cautionary tale of lessons learned the hard way. Even from the depths of depravity and desolation, a conversion of politics, morals, and ultimately of spirit is possible.

Washington, D.C. November 1, 2001 [Close quote.]

ONE LAST QUESTION OF DAWKINS
UNTIL THE NEXT BOOK

"When I give public lectures I always try to answer questions at the end. The commonest question by far is, 'What might humans evolve into next?' My interlocutor always seems touchingly to imagine it is a fresh and original question, and my heart sinks every time. For it is a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade. You cannot, in detail, forecast the future evolution of any species, except to say that statistically the great majority of species have gone extinct. But although we cannot forecast the future of any species, say, 20 million years hence, we can forecast the general range of ecological types that will be around. There will be herbivores and carnivores, grazers and browsers, meat eaters, fish eaters and insect eaters. These dietary forecasts themselves presuppose that in 20 million years there will still be foods corresponding to the definitions. Browsers presuppose the continued existence of trees. Insectivores presuppose insects, or anyway small, leggy invertebrates—doodoos, to employ that useful technical term from Africa. Within each category, herbivores, carnivores and so on, there will be a range of sizes. There will be runners, fliers, swimmers, climbers and burrowers. The species won't be exactly the same as the ones we see today, or the parallel ones that evolved in Australia or South America, or the dinosaur equivalents, or the mammal-like reptile equivalents. But there will be a similar range of types, making their livings in a similar range of ways." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 586

DID THE SYSTEM WIN?

I remember a long time ago, in the thick of the revolution, when an ad exec (I don't recall his name or who he worked for) said that the hippies could never win because they (advertisers) would always be there to turn everything into a commercial. I think that's what Albert Brooks is trying to get at in the following two paragraphs. Albert Brooks is the actor director who made the films, "Mothers", "Broadcast News", and "Defending Your Life", among many others:

"It's not that we didn't try. We did. We actually had the system by the throat for a whole minute. But the system won. The system doesn't get tired, or get arrested, or have screaming children who need things. The system is patient. It held up houses and cars and boats and we said, 'We don't need that!' And the system said, 'I'll wait. And while I'm waiting I might even get bigger, just for the fun of it.' And damn it, when the drugs wore off and the love wasn't free anymore, those houses and cars started to look good.

"I was feeling OK about us, I really was, that is until Madison Avenue stepped in and told me the truth. Aging is like going through a funnel. You start out with so much room, spinning so fast, wondering just how far you can go, but in the end you wind up going through that hole. That little hole. And since you can't take it with you, Kaiser Permanente wants it. I just wish Bob Dylan had held out a bit longer. I don't think Kaiser deserved that song. I think he should have saved 'The Times They Are A-Changin' for Depends.' " —Albert Brooks in a NEWSWEEK article, p. 60

DAWKINS GRINDS VERY SMALL INDEED

The following short passage demonstrates yet again Dawkins way of seeing the very small as the basis for so much large scale morphological change. Following him on his pilgrimage, we have arrived at life very small, but the passage below occurs only at Concestor Number 29 (the Placozoans) which rendezvous is—he's still nine Concestors away from the origin of life.

"This idea of community, as made up of lower-level units that flourish in the presence of each other, pervades life. Even within the single cell, the principle applies. Most animal cells house communities of bacteria so comprehensively integrated into the smooth working of the cell that their bacterial origins have only recently become understood. Mitochondria, once free-living bacteria, are as essential to the workings of our cells as our cells are to them. Their genes have flourished in the presence of ours, as ours have flourished in the presence of theirs. Plant cells by themselves are incapable of photosynthesis. That chemical wizardry is performed by guest workers, originally bacteria and now relabeled chloroplasts. Plant eaters, such as ruminants and termites, are themselves largely incapable of digesting cellulose. But they are good at finding and chewing plants (see the Mixotrich's Tale). The gap in the market offered by their plant-filled guts is exploited by symbiotic micro-organisms that possess the biochemical expertise necessary to digest plant material efficiently. Creatures with complementary skills flourish in each other's presence.

"What I want to add to that familiar point is that the process is mirrored at the level of every species' 'own' genes. The entire genome of a polar bear or a penguin, of a caiman or a guanaco, is an ecological community of genes that flourish in each other's presence. The immediate arena of this flourishing is the interior of an individual's cells. But the long-term arena is the gene pool of the species. Given sexual reproduction, the gene pool is the habitat of every gene as it is recopied and recombined down the generations."

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE REAL MEN IN THE WAR

Army Captain Ian Fishback, having returned from Iraq, is courageous enough to give the lie to his superiors, Donald “Rumdumb” Rumsfeld and George “Bush-league” Bush. Isn’t that Rumsfeld’s nickname, “Rumdumb” or “Rummy” or some other nickname which suggests a penchant for alcoholic excesses like the late Senator McCarthy suffered from?

Captain Fishback claims, according to an article in Newsweek, (November 7, 2005), that torture is a systematic and approved practice in Iraq. He himself participated in it. Meanwhile, Bush threatens to veto any bill which has anti-torture language in it while winking a claim that the US does not approve of any forms of torture. McCain, really a Democrat at heart in so many ways, has this to say about torture: “This isn’t about who they are. It’s about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies.” A liberal couldn’t have put it better and liberals have been saying such things from day one.

LAURA DANCES WHILE HUSTON BURNS

This was Laura Bush as she cheer-led Katrina rescuers. Can’t you just hear her as she says, “Yes, by golly gee whiz, that’s the way to go, kids!” Happier days in the past as dutiful spouse makes political capital for her lyin’ man.

A recent Newsweek article reports that Huston is no longer glad that they took in 150,000 Katrina survivers. Crime's up, welfare costs up, and medical facilities swamped—the infrastructure strained to the max.

Where's the money to rebuild New Orleans, boss? Could it be in Iraq, in the coffers of Haliburton?

INTELLIGENT DESIGN QUASHED AGAIN

By goodness, I'm getting close to the end of Dawkin's THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, very close. At the root of the debate below is an organic being called the bacterial flagellar motor which has a rotor mechanism in it. Dawkins shows in another place why larger animals could not evolve a wheel because the blood vessels and neural mechanism would twist themselves into knots as their wheel turns while the world turns. Then he goes on in the passage below to tickle out the reasoning which goes into his conclusions and to debate the clueless IDers who are always looking for things which could not have evolved so that they can say a supernatural power had to be involved in their appearance in the natural world. Wheeeew!

[Open quote.] As it happens, the bacterial flagellar motor itself has recently, in the hands of a species of creationists who call themselves 'Intelligent Design Theorists' been elevated to the status of icon of alleged unevolvability. Since it manifestly exists, the conclusion of their argument is different. Whereas I proposed unevolvability as an explanation for why large animals like mammals don't grow wheels, creationists have seized upon the bacterial flagellar wheel as something that cannot exist and yet does—so it must have come about by supernatural means!

This is the ancient 'Argument from Design', also called the 'Argument from Paley's Watchmaker', or the 'Argument from Irreducible Complexity'. I have less kindly called it the 'Argument from Personal Incredulity' because it always has the form: 'I personally cannot imagine a natural sequence of events whereby X could have come about. Therefore it must have come about by supernatural means. 'Time and again scientists have retorted that if you make this argument, it says less about nature than about the poverty of your imagination. The 'Argument from Personal Incredulity' would lead us to invoke the supernatural every time we see a good conjuror whose tricks we cannot fathom.

It is perfectly legitimate to propose the argument from irreducible complexity as a possible explanation for the lack of something that doesn't exist, as I did for the absence of wheeled mammals. That is very different from evading the scientist's responsibility to explain something that does exist, such as wheeled bacteria. Nevertheless, to be fair, it is possible to imagine validly using some version of the argument from design, or the argument from irreducible complexity. Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make the distinction. They may face some tricky judgments in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens, not just archaeological relics, what will they make of fragile, highly strung racehorses and greyhounds, of snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can't be born without Caesarian assistance, of blear-eyed Pekinese baby surrogates, of waLking udders such as Friesian cows, walking rashers such as Landrace pigs, or walking woolly jumpers such as Merino sheep? Molecular machines—nanotechnology—crafted for human benefit on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems.

Francis Crick, no less, has speculated semi-seriously in Life Itself that bacteria might not have originated on this planet but been seeded from elsewhere. In Crick's fantasy, they were sent in the nose-cone of a rocket by alien beings, who wanted to propagate their form of life, but shrank from the technically harder problem of transporting themselves and relied, instead, upon natural evolution to finish the job once the bacterial infection had taken root. Crick, and his colleague Leslie Orgel, who originally suggested the idea with him, supposed that the bacteria had originally evolved by natural processes on the home planet, but they could equally, while in the mood for science fiction, have added a touch of nanotechnological artifice to the mix, perhaps a molecular gearwheel like the flagellar motor which we see in Rhizobium and many other bacteria.

Crick himself—whether with regret or relief it is hard to say—finds little good evidence to support his own theory of Directed Panspermia. But the hinterland between science and science fiction constitutes a useful mental gymnasium in which to wrestle with a genuinely important question. Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we, in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artifacts? Another great molecular biologist, Jacques Monod, began his Chance and Necessity in similar terms. Could there be genuinely persuasive examples of irreducible complexity in nature: complex organisation made of many parts, the loss of any one of which would be fatal to the whole? If so, might this suggest genuine design by a superior intelligence, say from an older and more highly evolved civilisation on another planet?

It is possible that an example of such a thing might eventually be discovered. But the bacterial flagellar motor, alas, is not it. Like so many previous allegations of irreducible complexity, from the eye on, the bacterial flagellum turns out to be eminently reducible. Kenneth Miller of Brown University deals with the whole question in a tour de force of dear exposition. As Miller shows, the allegation that the component parts of the flagellar motor have no other functions is simply false. [Close quote.]

BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK. . .

Yes, that picture which looks so much like a bird is a dinosaur. The picture at the top is of the fossil itself. I did a little survey of the articles that Google gave me when I asked for "dinosaur birds", and I'd be dishonest if I didn't say that the debate as to whether birds evolved from dinosaurs is still very much heated.

But, speaking of fossils and ancient behavior, read below of the Nixonite-like behavior of the Bushites.



FROM THE INTERNET

Like Nixon, Bush and company have an enemies list. They never change, do they? I got the following info off the internet, but I can’t recall the exact address, so I’m lost to pass it on. Sorry.

[Open quote] Spurred by paranoia and aided by the USA Patriot Act, the Bush Administration has compiled dossiers on more than 10,000 Americans it considers political enemies and uses those files to wage war on those who disagree with its policies.

The enemies list dates back to Bush's days as governor of Texas and can be accessed by senior administration officials in an instant for use in campaigns to discredit those who speak out against administration policies or acts of the President.

The computerized files include intimate personal details on members of Congress; high-ranking local, state and federal officials; prominent media figures and ordinary citizens who may, at one time or another, spoken out against the President or Administration.

Capitol Hill Blue has spoken with a number of current and former administration officials who acknowledge existence of the enemies list only under a guarantee of confidentiality. Those who have seen the list say it is far more extensive than Richard Nixon's famous enemies list of Watergate fame or Bill Clintons dossiers on political enemies.

How is that you think Karl (Rove) and Scooter (Libby) were able to disseminate so much information on Joe Wilson and his wife, says one White House aide. They didn't have that information by accident. They had it because they have files on those who might hurt them.

White House insiders tell a disturbing tales of invasion of privacy, abuse of government power and use of expanded authority under the USA Patriot Act to dig into the personal lives of anyone the administration deems an enemy of the state.

Those on the list include former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, former covert CIA operative Valarie Plame, along with filmmaker and administration critic Michael Moore, Senators like California's Barbara Boxer, media figures like liberal writer Joe Conason and left-wing bloggers like Markos Zniga (the Daily Kos).

If you want to know who's sleeping with whom, who drinks too much or has a fondness for nose candy, this is the place to find it, says another White House aide. Karl (Rove) operates under the rule that if you fuck with us, we’ll fuck you over.

Rove started the list while Bush served as governor of Texas, compiling information on various political enemies in the state and leaking damaging information on opponents to friends in the press. The list grew during Bush's first run for President in 2000 but the names multiplied rapidly after the terrorist attacks of 2001 and passage of the USA Patriot Act. Using the powers under the act, Rove expanded the list to more than 10,000 names, utilizing the FBI's national security letters to gather private and intimate details on American citizens.

National security letters, which can be issued by an FBI supervisor without a judges review or approval, allows the bureau to sweep up the records of virtually any American citizen, examining their telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

The FBI issues some 30,000 national security letters a year to employers, credit bureaus, banks, travel agencies and other sources of information on American citizens. The Patriot Act also forbids anyone receiving such a letter to reveal they have passed on information to the federal government.

Those letters helped us build files quickly on those we needed to know more about, says a former White House aide.

The database of political enemies of the Bush administration is not maintained on White House computers and is located on a privately-owned computer offsite, but can be accessed remotely by a select list of senior aides, including Rove. The offsite location allowed the database to escape detection by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during his investigation of the Valerie Plame leak. The database is funded by private donations from Bush political backers and does not appear on the White House budget or Federal Election Commission campaign reports.

Bush is not the first President to use the FBI to keep track of his enemies. Richard M. Nixon used FBI files to try and discredit his opponents, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Department of Defense employee who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Bill Clinton used the FBI to compile dossiers on critics like Conservative Congressman Bob Barr and legal gadfly Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch.

But worried White House insiders say the intelligence gathered by the Bush administration is far larger, more extensive and potentially more damaging than the excesses of previous occupants of the White House. Even worse, it dovetails into a pattern of spying on Americans that has become commonplace since Bush took office.

Were talking about Big Brother at its most extreme, says one White House staffer. We know things about people that their spouses don't know and, if it becomes politically expedient, we will make sure the rest of the world knows.

The White House press official did not respond to a request for an interview on this story and did not return phone calls seeking comment. [Close quote]

SOME BEAUTY ON AN OFF DAY FROM INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

I'll tell you what my kick with this image is. Sitting here in the conservative heart of Washington State, the Inland Empire it's sometime called, it gives me a little kick of pleasure to send out a fashion image I got from a New York magazine, founded, I believe, by Andy Warhol. If he didn't found it, he had a hand in starting it up. Full of fashion and celebrity interviews, it's about as frolicsome and frivolous as a magazine can be. Even I can tell, now that I'm 68 years old, that what movie stars and celebrities say, can sometimes be a bit surreal. Even to me, it sounds something of a pose, like what's expected rather than what's real. And, then, they're such vulnerable targets for the conservative mugwomps, who like to slash and burn them!

I pity these stars for what their audience expects from them. How can they escape the toils of the consumer world when, after all, their personnae are items for sale just like a car or a conservative politician, so they have a pose and the media work off that pose, and so they are coopted by the world their characters' personnae fight against.

And, no, Abraham Lincoln could not be elected in modern America!

It's not that someone like George Clooney doesn't have something real to say, but when they say it in the glare of lights, outside the various characters they play, with all their millions glittering in clothes and jewelry, they can't compete with the characters they play which are more real than they are, so they come out lifesize and their words are reduced to the real world and thus what they say sounds tinny and unreal, like a poorly edited and shot film.

BOROWITZ REPORT IN OUR LOCAL INLANDER

You've probably all read some of Andy Borowitz's great work at satirizing current events. Included at the end of a recent satire about Bush debating Gena Davis from the TV drama, "Commander in Chief", Borowitz added, "Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan said that he would step down in 2006, saying that he wanted to spend more time making indecipherable remarks to his family."


A LETTER I WROTE TO US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
IN RESPONSE TO JOHN LEO'S LAUGHING ATTACK ON ATHLETES
GETTING CAUGHT USING STEROIDS

Subject: John Leo
Date: Thursday, August11, 2005 8:38 PM
From: George Thomas
To: US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

Dear Editor,

John’s column was a hoot, but he misses a couple of points. I don’t believe it’s too far a bridge to say that part of the reason athletes and others in many fields of endeavor cheat is because America has made a chemical addiction to success a synaptical habit in the American psyche and has made being a “loser” something of a curse. We’re way overboard in accreting adrenaline toward success, money and power in this country.

Second, I hope John Leo, if he’s going to write as he does about human responsibility, has been doing some serious research in evolutionary biology. A great deal of evidence is piling up which shows that human traits such as lying, perseverance, aggressiveness, passivity, goal orientation, in fact just about any human trait which individuals pride themselves on or curse themselves for not having, are pretty much a matter of genetics, even the “gumption” by which one might find the personal resources to overcome or develop a trait (i.e. synaptical chemical habit) which he or she does or does not have seems to be genetic.

I’d suggest Leo read the book, The Illusion of Free Will, and catch up on some of the works of Daniel Dennett or Steven Pinker. He might also glance into The Origin of Minds by Peggy La Cerra for a good read on the mechanisms of memory and choice. He’d get some good insight if he’d read Going Inside: a tour around a moment of consciousness and learn just how “consciousness”, whatever that might be, functions within the human brain.

Sad to say, there just may not be as much free will in the Cosmos as some would like to hope. For example, just how much choice is involved in the angry moment of release when someone in a barroom brawl swings just hard enough to turn a moment of anger into a moment of murder? And in a rush of angry, fearful adrenaline, why can one man stop his trigger finger while another can’t stop it? I don’t think there’s very much moral choice in such moments which turn one human animal into a murderer while the other escapes that curse. Real objective study would help all of us to the truth rather than just our throwing around our emotions encapsulated in moral pejoratives.

Thanks a whole hell of a lot,

Geo

[Crazy as this may sound, I do believe that the more each of us admits to our being nearly robots when it comes to behavior the freer each of us paradoxically becomes. The truth literally can set us free in this regard.] This bracketed info was not included in the letter, damn it. I fired it off too fast.

MITOCHONDRIA WERE ONCE FREE-LIVING ORGANISMS

Three of these entries, including this one and not counting the time piece, are starting to get us to the very bottom of evolution now:

"Most significantly, we [the oak and humans] both use precisely the same code for translating nucleic acid information into protein information, as do virtually all the other creatures on the planet,*" writes Sagan, but in a footnote he adds a very interesting piece of information.

[Footnote] "*The genetic code turns out to be not quite identical in all parts of all organisms on the Earth. At least a few cases are known where the transcription from DNA information into protein information in a mitochondrion employs a different code book from that used by the genes in the nucleus of the very same cell. This points to a long evolutionary separation of the genetic codes of mitochondria and nuclei, and is consistent with the idea that mitochondria were once free-living organisms, incorporated into the cell in a symbiotic relationship billions of years ago. The development and emerging sophistication of that symbiosis is, incidentally, one answer to the question of what evolution was doing between the origin of the cell and the proliferation of many-celled organisms in the Cambrian explosion." (COSMOS, Sagan, p. 38)


GET YOUR MIND AROUND THIS AND AROUND AND AROUND

As for me, I didn’t know keeping time was quite this complex. I just look at the clock hands in the clock face on the wall.

"Average Earth time, officially known as TDB (for barycentric dynamic time, using French word order) is the astronomers' time scale. It is the time that would be kept by a hypothetical cesium clock at sea level on a fictitious Earth that swings around the Sun at a constant speed in a perfect circle, in an otherwise empty Solar System. (The arcane world of precision timekeeping is populated by nearly as many hypothetical clocks as real ones!) This time scale is obtained by correcting real clock readings for the seasonal variation, plus a smaller correction for the effect of the Moon on the Earth's motion." —Robert March in an essay "Does Anybody Know The Right Time?" in the collection of science writing called MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE edited by William Shore


WE'RE ALL SPONGERS

We're getting down to sponges now, we're getting to the bottom of things. I've been plowing through this book for the longest time, but still to go are 100 more pages. I'm taking a lot of time to work on my algebra class also. Contemplate what Dawkins calls "landmark".

"The evolution of multicellular sponges from single-celled protozoa is one of the landmark events in evolution. . . ." Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 486


HATE TO TELL YOU THIS, BUT NOT ONLY HAVE WE BEEN SPONGES,
WE'RE ALSO ALL ASSHOLES AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER

"Gastrulation is something that all animals do early in their life. Typically, before gastrulation, an animal embryo consists of a hollow ball of cells, the blastula, whose wall is one cell thick. During gastrulation the ball indents to form a cup with two layers. The opening of the cup closes in to form a small hole called the blastopore. Almost all animal embryos go through this stage, which presumably means it is a very ancient feature indeed. You might expect that so fundamental an opening would become one of the two deep holes in the body, and you'd be right. But now comes the big divide in the animal kingdom, between the Deuterostomia (every pilgrim who arrived before Rendezvous 26, including us) and the Protostomia (the huge throng who are now joining at Rendezvous 26).

"In deuterostome embryology, the eventual fate of the blastopore is to become the anus (or at least the anus develops close to the blastopore). The mouth appears later as a separate perforation at the other end of the gut. The protostomes do it differently: in some, the blastopore becomes the mouth, and the anus appears later; in others, the blastopore is a slit that subsequently zippers up in the middle, with the mouth at one end and the anus at the other. Protostome means 'mouth first'. Deuterostome means 'mouth second'.

"This traditional embryological classification of the animal kingdom has been upheld by modern molecular data. There are indeed two main kinds of animal, the deuterostomes (our lot) and the protostomes (them over there)." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 377-378

BACK IN BUSINESS

Got the old iMac back last night and now we're back in business.


JUST ANOTHER INTERESTING TALE

I found this tale about jellyfish on Mercherchar of the Palau Islands. Americans fought a pretty tough battle in those islands during the Second World War, I believe.

[Open quote] During the Second World War, sonar operators looking for submarines were puzzled by what seemed to be a false bottom of the sea that rose towards the surface every evening, and sank back down again the next morning. It turned out to be the bulk of the plankton, millions of tiny crustaceans and other creatures, rising to feed near the surface at night, then sinking at morning. Why should they do this? The best guess seems to be that during the hours of daylight they are vulnerable to visually hunting predators such as fish and squids, so they seek the dark safety of the depths by day. Why, then, come to the surface at night, for it is a long journey that must consume a lot of energy? One student of the plankton has compared it to a human daily walking 25 miles each way, just to get breakfast.

The reason for visiting the surface is that food ultimately comes from the sun, via plants. The surface layers of the sea are unbroken green prairies, with microscopic single-celled algae in the role of waving grass. The surface is where the food ultimately is, and that is where the grazers, and those that feed on the grazers, and those that in turn feed on them, must be. But if it is safe to be there only by night because of visually hunting predators, a diurnal migration is exactly what the grazers and their small predators must undertake. And apparently they do. The 'prairie' itself doesn't migrate. If there were any sense in doing so, it should swim against the animal tide, for its whole raison' d'être is to catch sunlight at the surface during the day, and avoid being eaten.

Whatever the reason, most of the animals in the plankton migrate down for the day and up for the night. The jellyfish, or many of them, follow the herds, like lions and hyenas tracking the wildebeest across the Mara and Serengeti plains. Although, unlike lions and hyenas, jellyfish don't target individual prey, even blindly trailing tentacles will benefit by following the herds, and this is one of the reasons jellyfish swim. Some species increase their catch rate by zigzagging about, again not individually targeting prey, but increasing the area swept by those tentacles with their batteries of lethal harpoons. Others just migrate up and down.

A different kind of migration has been described for the massed jellyfish of 'Jellyfish Lake' on Mercherchar, one of the Palau Islands (an American colony in the western Pacific). The lake, which communicates underground with the sea and is therefore salty, is named after its huge population of jellyfish. There are several kinds, but the dominant one is Mastigias, an estimated 20 million of them in a lake 2.5 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide. All the jellyfish spend the night near the western end of the lake. When the sun rises in the east, they all swim straight towards it and therefore the eastern end of the lake. They stop before they reach the shore, for an interestingly simple reason. The trees fringing the shore cast a deep shadow, cutting off so much of the sun's light that the jellyfish's sun-seeking automatic pilot starts to drive them towards the now brighter west. As soon as they come out from the trees' shadow, however, they turn east again.

This internal conflict traps them around the line of the shadow, with the consequence (which I dare not think is more than coincidence) of keeping them a safe distance from the dangerously predatory sea anemones that line the shore itself. In the afternoon, the jellyfish follow the sun back to the western end of the lake, where the whole armada again becomes trapped at the shadow line of the trees. When it becomes dark, they swim vertically up and down at the western end of the lake, until the dawn sun lures their automatic guidance system back towards the east. I don't know what they might gain from this remarkable twice-daily migration The published explanation satisfies me too little to bear repetition For now, the lesson of the tale must be that the living world offers much that we don't yet understand, and that is exciting in itself. [Close quote] —Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR’S TALE, pp. 468-469
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“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” —Blaise Pascal (See, it’s not only us modern atheists who think this is true.)

FOUNDING FATHERS NOT CHRISTIANS

We've finally got proof that America's founding fathers were not Christians—at least they were not the same kind of Christians as our modern fundamentalists. In Missouri, their Christian legislature is trying to make Christianity the official religion of Misery—oops, I mean Missouri. As I've many times said, Christians would not be able to write the Constitution that our founding fathers created so I've always guessed that our founding fathers were not really Christians. I knew that real Christians would want to make America a Christian nation. They would not be able to create a secular American nation. Now we have proof of my hypothesis; the Missouri Christians prove my point. Since they insist on making Missouri a Christian state, we must assume that had they been around at the founding of our nation, they would have made America a Christian nation too. Since America's founding fathers did not act like the Missouri Christians, we must assume that, ergo, our founding fathers were not Christians for had they been real Christians, they would have made Christianity the official religion of America. Can anyone see any fault with my logic?


STILL NO iMAC

The iMac G5 is still in the hanger. As I understand it, Apple does have a recall on certain serial numbers. Since mine is still under the 90 day service warrant, I didn't even ask about mine. It's being fixed free and slowly anyhow. But the failure of the logic board and power supply fits with the problems that other iMac G5s are having.

REMEMBER JUSTICE THOMAS'S HEARING

While selling books at the library used book store, I came across Anita Hill's book, Speaking Truth To Power, about the Justice Thomas confirmation hearing. I was working evening shift while that hearing was going on. That was the first time I truly realized how nasty the right wing conservatives can be, how conscienceless and implacable they can be in their drive for power. How they distorted and lied at every turn to discredit her evidence. I also recall she had not sought to come to Washington to testify, had tried to avoid it. It was not that she was someone out to get Thomas, but she had been brought to Washington to testify and, so, could not get out of it. Subtly, they ignored the facts and attacked her character with inuendo and distortion.

The funny thing about all of it was that I would have had no trouble with Justice Thomas's sexual appetites at all, but his lying did bother me. He had been a recently divorced man, lonely and horny, and so he made an inappropriate pass at a young woman in his office. I understood him perfectly. I was single myself at the time and had gone through a painful divorce a few years back. As far as I was concerned that didn't disqualify him for the post. The irony is that the one's who would have not wanted him to be a Justice were the ones who were also raping Anita Hill. They had to rape Hill in order to justify Thomas to themselves. They are a strange bunch.