WALMART’S SKID MARKS

The following remarks are from Here!

The revolution to take back America has begun.

Until now, big corporations like Wal-Mart said or did whatever they wanted, and got away with it. Well, yesterday, you proved Wal-Mart wrong and demonstrated the power ordinary people have to change Wal-Mart and change America for the better.

Here's what happened. In October 2005, Wal-Mart said it supported raising the minimum wage. But, since then, Wal-Mart has used its industry lobbyists to oppose a minimum wage increase. And, up until yesterday, Wal-Mart's own chief lobbyist claimed the public had misinterpreted Wal-Mart's statement and that Wal-Mart never supported raising the minimum wage.

When we exposed Wal-Mart's lie and called on the company to come clean, Wal-Mart caved into public pressure and said it once again supported raising the minimum wage. We can only hope Wal-Mart will now actually do something positive to help millions of hard-working Americans who live in poverty.

Wal-Mart's reversal on the minimum wage proves the power that every American has to change this company and this country for the better. Now, if we could change Wal-Mart's position on the minimum wage with 243,600 supporters, imagine what we could with 1 million.

SELF EXPLANITORY




















Aint' this lovely?

LIKE THE SHADOW, THE SPERM KNOW

Now don't get too excited as you read about sex and watching sex and all those other nasty things that scientists just must look into. What I think about when I read the below is the idea that Richard Dawkins has that genes are the at the root of evolution. It's them that are driving change. And, here, you can see that factors way beyond human choice are driving us ever forward into a brave new world.

Photo through the leaves of my favorite female reading in our backyard. >>>>

[OPEN QUOTE] Animals have developed some fascinating tactics to ensure that their genes survive to the next generation: impressive color displays, the best pheromone smell, sperm that induces the female to ovulate right after mating. And humans apparently aren't above such biochemical shenanigans. A recent study has shown that human sperm are honed for competition.

The study, conducted at the University of Western Australia, examined the effect of gender-specific pornography on sperm. On one day of the study, the heterosexual subjects donated samples while they viewed pornography that featured three women. On a separate day, the same subjects viewed X-rated pictures depicting a woman with two men. Overall, the sperm became more vigorous—and, it's surmised, more fertile—after the subjects watched other men in action. "We found that men viewing images containing both men and women had higher sperm motility in masturbatory ejaculate," explained the head researcher, Leigh Simmons.

But why does heterosexual sperm key up around sexy men? Simmons thinks it has something to do with sperm competition. Deep in our specie's past, a particular female often had multiple male suitors at one time. As a result, an assortment of sperm swarmed toward her ova, and the fastest swimmer won the fertilization contest. Over time, the researchers surmise, human males evolved to rev their sperm when they faced this kind of competition. So as the study subjects watched other men have sex, the perceived challenge worked their sperm into a frenzy.

It's not surprising that science has confirmed that we're not so different from our animal brethren. Most other animals have sperm that roils near competitors too, but the race to the egg isn't just about speed—it's also about cheating. The dragonfly, for example, has a bristled, scoop-shaped penis. He uses it to brush foreign semen away from his mate's egg, giving his own swimmers a head start. The chimp cheats later in the game. He kills offspring fathered by other chimps and then plants his seed before the bereaved female finds another mate. Even the lowly sea squirt preemptively swindles other would-be fathers. The rock-bound sea squirt casts his sperm into the water, sterilizing other, competing species' ova. With fewer unrelated spawn cruising the waters near his permanent home, the sea squirt can hoard his real estate for his own offspring.

These tactics may seem a bit dodgy, but people shouldn't get too smug. Even if our sperm don't cheat on their way to the egg, some humans still practice the disturbing habit of buying pheromone perfume over the Internet. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Siri Steiner in Popular Science (Sept. 2005, p. 114)

GOD'S AN ACCIDENT

I'm giving you a little taste of an article in the December 2005 Atlantic Monthly called "Is God An Accident?". It makes a lot of sense and explains why so many people must believe in gods. Some of the findings eked out in the studies described below came from observations of autistic children. It's interesting to me how much of our knowledge of how the brain functions is based on studies of those with major or minor brain malfunctions. The information contained in this article will perhaps make it unnecessary for me to read Why God Won’t Go Away, a book I've had on my shelf a long while. But, then, I've got lots of books I'm only slowly getting to which I've purchased while working at the Spokane library book store down in the lobby. At a dollar or a couple of dollars a book, who can resist?

The picture is of a road leading into an interesting geological feature here in the Inland Empire, called Hole In the Ground. Though not very large nor impressive in size, it's story is interesting. It was carved out thousands of years ago when a great inland sea in what is now Montana broke through its ice dam and ran wild to the west, carving out many such features in the terrain.

[OPEN QUOTE] At this point the religion-as-accident theory says nothing about supernatural beliefs. Babies have two systems that work in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and understand—and when the get older, to manipulate—physical and social entities. In other words, both these systems are biological adaptations that give human beings a badly needed head start in dealing with objects and people. But these systems go awry in two important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists, it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity—a mind or soul—are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.

This duality is immediately apparent in our imaginative life. Because we see people as separate from their bodies, we easily understand situations in which people's bodies are radically changed while their personhood stays intact. Kafka envisioned a man transformed into a gigantic insect; Homer described the plight of men transformed into pigs; in Shrek2 an ogre is transformed into a human being, and a donkey into a steed; in Star Trek a scheming villain forcibly occupies Captain Kirk's body so as to take command of the Enterprise; in The Tale of the Body Thief Anne Rice tells of a vampire and a human being who agree to trade bodies for a day; and in 13 Going on 30 a teenager wakes up as thirty-year-old Jennifer Garner. We don't think of these events as real, of course, but they are fully understandable, it makes intuitive sense to us that people can be separated from their bodies, and similar transformations show up in religions around the world.

This notion of an immaterial soul potentially separable from the body clashes starkly with the scientific view. For psychologists and neuroscientists, the brain is the source of mental life; our consciousness, emotions, and will are the products of neural processes. As the claim is sometimes put: The mind is what the brain does. I don't want to overstate the consensus here; there is no accepted theory as to precisely how this happens, and some scholars are skeptical that we will ever develop such a theory. But no scientist takes seriously Cartesian dualism, which posits that thinking need not involve the brain. There is just too much evidence against it. [CLOSE QUOTE]

THE CHINA BLOCKBUSTER: WAR OR PEACE?

Whether or not America, with men like Bush leading us, will be able to move aside and peacefully make way for a mightier nation seems a mighty scary proposition.

"Some 25 million Chinese enter the workforce annually. Given the age of its current population, its savings rate of 40 percent, an economy open to investment, a dramatic commitment to mass education and to improving the lives of its own people, and the ability to transfer huge numbers of workers from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity manufacturing, China should be able to continue growing at a rate of 7 to 8 percent for the foreseeable future. Let's pause to contemplate what that means: By the middle of the century, the poor country we saw 50 years ago as just so many rice paddies and rickshaws may well be the largest economy in the world. It is an awe-inspiring shift in global power comparable to the rise of Europe in the 17th century and that of America in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

—Mort Zuckerman in US News (Jan. 23, 2006 p. 68)

Call this photo Natural Geometry >>

BUSH CREATES ANOTHER BUSH-LEAGUE NATION

Paul Bremmer (the point man in Iraq lo those many years ago) has admitted in a US News question/answer article (Jan. 24, 2006, p. 24) that we have made a mess of Iraq. You gotta read between the lines:

"The concept of democracy to many people [in Iraq] is just "majority rules." But as most Americans understand, democracy also depends on protection of minority rights. I preached that theme in my many, many negotiations with Iraqis. I think it is gradually being understood. But I do not know how well it is understood by Sunnis. There are some Sunnis who think they are a majority of the country.

"Question: Was Iraqi sectarianism inevitable?

Answer: One of the characteristics of post conflict situations is that political leaders tend to focus on what we would call in America their base. That can have the effect of exacerbating apparent differences, in this case sectarian differences. What we could have done [to discourage that], I am not sure."

This is an old article now and many more people are admitting the same thing, but the point I wanted to make is not about Iraq but about American fundamentalists and their inability to understand compromise as a way of doing business in a democracy. Now if only Christians here at home understood that our own Constitutional government was created with a strong bias to protect the rights of minorities. Under the Bush regime, we're losing sight of that.

MAKE A LIST, ANY LIST. . . .

Make any list of any positive or negative cultural trends from poverty to murder rates in America and the South will end up at top or bottom, depending on how backward the trend is or isn't. I like to bring these items to your attention. This time it's smoking cessation:

"Best grades for progress in smoking cessation are Maine, Washington, Vermont, Delaware and a N.Y./R.I. tie. Worst? Head south, hold your nose, and you guessed it: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina."

—From an American Lung Association release as reported in a recent Newsweek.

Yep! Ah'll support ma bacci comp'ny e'en'f'it kills me.

Do you think the U.S. Constitution can survive, dragged down by that bunch of yahoos? I apologize to all those stuck down there who can't escape to a better land. Evolution teaches us that we are mighty fond of the environment we grow up in. It's hard to move, but, then, the ability to move freely about is a sign that one has escaped his or her evolutionary handcuffs.

THE OLDER WE GET,
THE DENSER WE GET

Recent studies suggest that older is better if wisdom is your game. In a Newsweek January 16, 2006 health article, I came across the following two passages:

“The neurons themselves may lose some processing speed with age, but they become ever more richly intertwined. Magnified tremendously, the brain of a mentally active 50-year-old looks like a dense forest of interlocking branches, and this density reflects both deeper knowledge and better judgment. . .

“No one knows exactly what this all means, but the finding suggests that healthy brains compensate for the depredations of age by expanding their neural networks across the bilateral divide. My own work suggests that, besides keeping us sharp, this neural integration makes it easier to reconcile our thoughts with our feelings.”

I call the photo "Geometry in Gray, Green and Blue".

THE ANCIENT LIVES INSIDE OF US

I’ve included the following passages, again from Newsweek (Jan. 16, 2006), because in reading Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, I remember vaguely how far back in time it was when the “archaea”, mentioned in passing in this passage, came into existence. Yes, we’re carrying around some mighty old ancestors in our guts. Do you get a gut feeling about evolution, thinking about it?

“You may use antibacterial dish soap and wash your hands every time you sneeze, hut Jeffrey Gordon wants you to know that you're crawling with germs. Gordon, the director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, studies bacteria and ancient forms of single-celled life called archaea—and no matter how clean you think you are, your gut would make him a pretty good laboratory. It's oozing with 750 trillion bacteria and archaea, and there's very little you can do about it.

“Then again, you probably wouldn't want to do anything about it, because those little guys are good for you. The microbes in your gut have genes of their own, and, as scientists are now learning, those genes are essential to the body's functioning. Gut flora help the immune system ward off more-dangerous bugs; they break down nutrients; they may even manipulate how the body stores fat. If doctors could control the flora, they might be able to ward off disease with a completely new toolbox. Meanwhile, maintaining a good balance of microorganisms through diet turns out to be an easy way to strengthen your overall health.”
______________________________________________

“We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.” —W. H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)

THOU SHALT NOT BE AWARE

I think it's informative to use the title of Alice Miller's book to introduce this short passage. As I've pointed out several times, conservatives are often haunted by their pasts, completely influenced by them but completely unaware of the devil in their backpacks, yet they fear psychiatry and counseling and make fun of those who go to counseling to make some progress in their lives. Brock notes this flaw in Norman Podhoretz. We've seen this fear of facing themselves in Rove and in Delay also. I know we saw it in Hitler and in Stalin also. Men who are afraid of their own shadows live shadowy lives.

"They wrote with an analytical precision that awed me; what I didn't see then were the unspoken passions underneath. Though his son John told me that his father's politics were deeply entwined with his conceptions of 'manliness' in Breaking Ranks, the most famous neocon manifesto, the short, flabby elder Podhoretz did not acknowledge that his defection bore any relation to his inner life. While revealing nothing about himself, Podhoretz claimed that he was forced to defect from liberalism by the intellectual weaknesses, cowardice, and sexual experimentation of his former friends." —David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 35-36

I would like to go one step beyond Brock when I say I think almost all analytic writing (i.e. reasoned writing) is writing that excuses actions or justifies one's own actions or justifies one's feelings about reality and events in reality. But it's all about feelings rather than thinking.

PS: Photo of my side yard back of house to front at 5:00 PM after days of rain and two sunny.

MORE DIRTY UNDERBELLY OF THE RIGHT

The next paragraph speaks for itself. You gotta wonder how the religious right can work with these supporters of theirs. This makes even further sense when you consider what the information above tells us about the right. Recall that the Nazis confiscated all the impessionistic art because they thought it was decadent, then kept it in museums for them to secretly peek at.

"The upper management tier at Insight was a nightmarish cult of personality within the Moonie cult, which I now experienced personally because I was one of them. Kirk was married to a woman named Linda Moore, Insight's managing editor, who was so degrading and foul-mouthed that no one wanted to speak to her, muh less work for her. It could not have helped Linda's disposition that Kirk abused his power by openly courting another woman editor right under Linda's nose. Kirk introduced me to a prototype of a certain kind of right-wing man, married or not, that I would encounter at the very highest levels of the movement in the years to come. To Kirk, women, including his wife, Linda, were "cunts," or "fucking cunts." Arnaud either had "no balls," or Kirk threatened to "cut his balls off." Men who didn't follow Kirk's orders were "prissy," "sissies," "faggots," "cocksuckers," or "fudge-packers." Kirk had a problem with alcohol abuse, rarely showing up at work until 4 or 5 PM., when we all jumped to attention and plotted to circumvent or upstage Arnaud." —David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 31

MORE INSIGHTS FROM EX-NEOCON INSIDER, DAVID BROCK

THE OPEN BIAS IN RIGHT WING JOURNALISM

[OPEN QUOTE] The political bias was more blatant on the weekly [Washington] Times magazine, Insight, where I was assigned as a news reporter. . . . Insight was modeled on Time and Newsweek. I quickly learned what it took to be one of Pod's [John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz] golden boys: a mix of reported fact laced with a heavy dose of conservative—preferably neoconservative—spin. We made no bones about the magazine's ideological biases around the office, which we justified as balancing out the liberal biases that so infuriated us in the pages of the major news weeklies. Yet in the doublespeak that I was coached in at the Times, the magazine was marketed as objective journalism, and this is how we presented ourselves to the reading public.

I could see that those who hewed to the party line got plum assignments and rose through the ranks. One young comer was Danny Wattenberg, the son of neocon columnist Ben Wattenberg and a former speechwriter for the architect of Reagan's contra policy, Elliott Abrams. Abrams also happened to be Pod's brother-in-law. On the other hand, those who didn't inject politics into their work—and there were plenty of regular, old-school journalists on both the paper and the magazine—had their copy mangled by Pod and were shunted to the sidelines by the mini-cons. [CLOSE QUOTE] by David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 27.

The comparison between the doublespeak of these Washington Times staffers and the staffers of the "Fox in the Bush Network" is educational. Sadly, too many of the readers and watchers of those two propaganda outlets for the Bushite religion are too unsophisticated and undereducated to evaluate what they're getting. There's a reason that Republicans push their followers to distrust the intellectual elite. That's how Bush and company stay in power, by trashing solid scholarship and scientific integrity and supporting those who are not so objective.

WHO'S A JUDICIAL ACTIVIST?

All this stuff is so obvious, can anyone on the right claim that their goal is to be judicially conservative? Brock tells it like it is from the inside out:

"More than any single fIgure, for the right, Bork's nomination represented the culmination of a strategy put in place at the beginning of the Reagan administration to force a right-wing economic and social agenda on the country by judicial fiat. Judicial conservatism—the respectable idea of a limited role for the judiciary in a democracy—was abandoned by these right-wing judicial extremists, who belonged to a secretive legal network called the Federalist Society, which was devoted to restricting privacy rights and reproductive freedoms, rolling back civil rights gains, and thwarting the authority of government to regulate industry in the public interest. In the Reagan administration, Federalist lawyers, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, Theodore Olson, and Kenneth Starr in the Justice Department, Kenneth Cribb in the White House, and Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, among many others, worked to strip away civil rights, voting rights, and environmental and consumer protections, and to defend discriminatory practices by cities, local schools, and religious institutions. Reagan-appointed Federalist judges like Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Laurence Silberman did the same from the federal bench. After years of pitched battles over the selection of judges in the Reagan era, the elevation of Bork was seen as a way to turn back decades of liberal jurisprudence by tipping the balance on the high court toward the right for years to come." —Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 45

POLITICS SANS INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY or
THE ROOTS OF MODERN CONSERVATISM

"When I moved to Washington DC, I hadn't known I was signing up for a movement, a well-financed, tightly run political machine intensely devoted to enacting a rigid ideological orthodoxy in the political realm. I knew nothing of the movement's history: its roots in GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s; its takeover of the Republican Party in Senator Barry Goldwater's losing bid for the presidency in 1964; its exploitation of racial fears and cultural divisions in Richard Nixon's victories; and the installation of one of its own into the presidency, Ronald Reagan, by fusing its secular anti-Communist, anti liberal wing with a burgeoning fundamentalist religious wing. Had I been drawn to liberalism, rather than conservatism, I would have found no self-identified, hardwired "liberal movement" in the 1980s; indeed, the right would prove to be far more rigidly doctrinaire than the PC crowd that had so offended me in Berkeley. Yet having been embraced by the conservative campus underground at Berkeley, I settled in among these clannish political renegades without reservation." —David Brock, Blinded By The Right, pp. 21-21

PS: Photo is by yours truly. It's from a series I took around town called Looking Up In Spokane.

JOURNALISTIC CORRUPTION ON THE WASHINGTON TIMES

We've got a local columnist here in Spokane who dotes on the Washington Times (his blog links to it) and who is also a fundamentalist Christian. When I point out how badly Moon and his newspaper treat journalistic standards, he just shrugs. So much for religious fundamentalism and journalistic integrity.

David Brock worked for the Times in addition to being deeply inside the conservative and Christian Washington establishment. In the following two paragraphs, read how much conservative fundamentalists like our local boy are willing to shrug off. And our local man claims to be a Christian which in my mind equates to being an hypocrite.

[OPEN QUOTE] In theory, the [Washington] Times was supposed to be no more conservative than other newspapers were liberal: its political point of view would be confined to the editorial pages, while the news columns would be fair, balanced, and objective. In practice, the Times was closer to a European-style newspaper, where one political stance or another openly infuses the entire publication, than it was to the conventions of American journalism. Though the conservative movement operated outside the Republican Party while seeking influence within it, in the Reagan era, the movement's agenda—and therefore that of the Times—was pretty much Reagan's: militant anti-Communism, tax cuts to benefit corporations and the rich, dismantlement of affirmative action and social welfare programs, deregulation, and union-busting. In high school, at the RFK Foundation, and at Berkeley, the crusading style of journalism was one that I had emulated; I had taken no journalism courses in college that would have shown me another way.

Moon unabashedly mixed politics and journalism. While publishing the [Washington] Times, he also directed the American Freedom Coalition, a pro-Reagan, grassroots political lobby. When Congress cut off aid to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries or contras, Arnaud [de Borchgrave, editor in chief at the Washington Times] wrote an editorial announcing a Times fund-raising drive for a Nicaraguan Freedom Fund, endowed with a $100,000 check from Bo Hi Pak. To the horror of many in the newsroom, Arnaud insisted on splashing the editorial across the front page. Arnaud's action came two months after Reagan aide Oliver North had drafted a secret memo calling for the establishment of such a fund. Four editors quit the paper, accusing Arnaud of ordering changes in an editorial on South Korea after he discussed the subject with one of the owners, violating guarantees of editorial independence for the news department. Wire service copy was doctored in stories dealing with the Rev's [Moon's] felony conviction for tax evasion. And there were endless controversies and resignations over what became known as "Prudenizing" news copy—slanting it in a conservative direction. In this culture, I cut my reporter's teeth. [CLOSE QUOTE] by David Brock in Blinded By The Right, pp. 24-25.

SUNDOGS OVER SPOKANE 6/3/06






Believe it or not, these wonderful atmospheric events, called sundogs, appeared over Spokane when I just happened to have my camera handy. Thought I'd share them with you. They were a joy to behold.

NOW FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY PHILOSARTRECAL

All the following excerpts from Sartre come from Sartre's Existentialism as selected by Gordon Marino in Basic Writings of Existentialism, Modern Library edition (2004).

Despair, Freedom of Action and the Human Connection in Existentialism

According to Sartre, despair is a sort of giving up anticipating results beyond which my will and a limited set of possibilities would predict. It is acting without expectations or hopes because “no God, no scheme, can adapt the world and its possibilities to my will.” Despair is relying only on things within my own will and letting the world go its own way. Can you imagine this wonderful thing of freedom—this despair that is a positive state of being, a sort of proof that one is fully alive and functioning?

Sartre says in another place that “From these few reflections it is evident that nothing is more unjust than the objections that have been raised against us. Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you’ve got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.”

“. . . it [existentialism] can not be taken for a philosophy of quietism, since it defines man in terms of action; nor for a pessimistic description of man—there is no doctrine more optimistic since man’s destiny is within himself; nor for an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only hope is in his acting and that action is the only thing that enables a man to live. Consequently, we are dealing here with an ethics of action and involvement.”

—John Paul Sartre

Not more than ten days ago, I was reading a piece of Christian writing on a blogsite, and it claimed that the Universe is meaningless without god. I come across that claim all the time by those who are religious, but I can testify that the belief is not true, at least not true for everyone. My atheism does not make me or the Universe feel empty or purposeless. In fact atheism ought to fill us with hope and strength, knowing that humans give all meaning and purpose to the Universe. It’s a sad religion that asks us to put our meaning and purpose outside ourselves into some pie in the sky, some supernatural phantasm, about which we know nothing except what a few old books want to tell us to imagine about that being. I do know that it’s a hard thing to accept our absolute freedom if we have spent our lives being undermined by religions which disembowel us and take our force from us and give it to an imaginary force outside of our will and our nature.

I respond positively when Sartre suggests that existentialists are joined inseparably with all humanity by our existential “thinking”, not selfishly isolated as some would like to tell us that we are:

“The philosophies of Descartes and Kant to the contrary, through the I think [cogito] we reach our own self in the presence of others, and the others are just as real to us as our own self. Thus, the man who becomes aware of himself through the cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he can not be anything (in the sense that we say that someone is witty or nasty or jealous) unless others recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself. This being so, in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call intersubjectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and what others are.”

That’s pretty clear and undeniable, isn’t it? But what of Christians who claim to find themselves in Jesus or a god of some sort, rather than in their humanity? Well that may be so, but isn’t it their own thoughts which interpret what their good books tell them? Don’t they constantly struggle to understand the words of their imagined god? So aren’t they also only playing a little solipsistic game with themselves when they imagine they are living their lives directed by a power outside themselves? How do they know they are being directed by some power beyond themselves and not by their own thoughts since they never hear that power speaking directly to them? Those who literally hear voices are, as we all know, crazy and suitable for detainment and likely to do anything to their fellow humans.

PS: Andy Rooney is probably an atheist or very nearly one. That's his picture above.

McCAIN SEEKS HIS OWN LEVEL

Reading the following, I'd say that America is still in the hands of the theocrats:

[OPEN QUOTE] But if McCain is going to quiet his critics on the right, he may need to start with Grover Norquist, a wide-ranging activist whose office serves as Grand Central for a disparate collection of conservative pressure groups. Norquist has campaigned against McCain since the New Hampshire primary in 2000 in what looks like a personal feud. He derides McCain as a flip-flopper: a Reaganesque tax-cutter who opposed Bush's fiscal policy. "When people say McCain is raising a lot of money and has got high name ID, the answer is yes, he's going to need all that to overcome his other challenges," Norquist says.

Team McCain dismisses Norquist as being obsessed with the senator and worried that McCain's probe of the lobbying business could imperil Norquist's influence network, the so-called K Street Project, which he built with the likes of former House majority leader Tom DeLay and indicted superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. One senior McCain aide compared Norquist to a classic 1920s tale of a huckster-preacher. "The K Street Project will be moving," said the aide, who requested anonymity to avoid a public dispute with Norquist. "Elmer Gantry had to as well." (Norquist says McCain's aides have made empty threats about the Abramoff investigation, and that Abramoff never tried to involve me in anything that was inappropriate.”) [CLOSE QUOTE] —Richard Wolffe, Newsweek, May 22, 2006 p. 34


K STREET: WILL HOT RODDERS DROWN OUT DEMOCRACY?

The following story is in sourcewatch.org:

[OPEN QUOTE] The K Street Project is a project by the Republican Party to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials. It was launched in 1995, by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and House majority leader Tom DeLay.

K Street in Washington DC is where the big lobbying firms have their headquarters and is sometimes refered to as the fourth branch of government. Lobbying firms have great influence in U.S. national politics due to monetary resources and the revolving door policy of hiring former government officials. It is common practice for politicians to request money from lobbying firms for an exchange in better access to officials and to buy favoritism in policies.

Historically, K Street hires top ex-politicians from both major parties since party in power can vary between elections and among the legislative and executive branches in government. During most of the George W. Bush administration, the Republican party had majority control of both houses of Congress, in addition to control of the White House. DeLay of the House, Rick Santorum of the Senate, and Grover Norquist took this opportunity to expand the K Street Project by pressuring major lobbying firms to hire only Republicans in any new or open positions.

But in June 2004, the Washington Post reported that the power of the K Street Project might be waning. "According to a review of job listings in Influence.biz, a lobbying newsletter, more than 40 percent of lobbyists with identifiable party backgrounds hired in the past six months have been Democrats. During the same period a year earlier, Democrats constituted only 30 percent of those hired." [1]

With "Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) running neck and neck with President Bush in most polls and with the outlook for the Senate a tossup, a wide range of interest groups are filling some of their lobbying and public relations openings with Democrats—just in case the center of influence switches. 'There is some bet-hedging going on that wasn't going on a year and a half ago,' said Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. of Patton Boggs LLP, one of Washington's largest lobbying-law firms." —Washington Post, July 1, 2004

In September 2004, The Hill reported the opposite K Street hiring trend: "Retiring House Democrats are feeling a cold draft from K Street as they seek post-congressional employment at lobbying firms, trade groups and corporations. By contrast, K Street is aggressively courting GOP lawmakers who have announced their retirements, suggesting that the business community is confident the GOP will retain the Speaker's gavel in January and that business wants to fortify its Republican Rolodexes." [2]

Not everyone agreed with the conclusion that "the 'K Street Project' is alive and well"; "Democrats argue that the crop of retiring lawmakers seeking employment is not broad enough to discern a pattern or divine the intentions of K Street." Retiring Republican Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn, who was interviewing with 15 firms, said K Street's current GOP bias is needed to balance a long period of Democratic bias, when the Dems enjoyed House majority party status for 40 years. "K Street is still only 30 percent Republican, so there's a lot more work to do to make it even," said Dunn.[3] http://thehill.com/news/091504/kstreet.aspx [CLOSE QUOTE]

BUSH LITE

WHY DO WE HAVE TO KEEP EXPLAINING THE WHEEL
TO FUNDAMENTALIST BELIEVERS?

[OPEN QUOTE] Why, of the assertions of modern science, does evolution by natural selection attract the most dissent? As the philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, Darwin's theory is no more implausible than the claim by quantum mechanics that an electron can appear to be in two places at once, yet physicists don't have to endlessly explain and justify their theories to a skeptical public. Dennett's answer is that natural selection, "by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God's existence." Which should leave no one in doubt about the source of the attack on Darwinism in the guise of intelligent design: it comes from religion.

The intelligent-design movement suffered a political setback last December when a federal judge ordered a Pennsylvania school district to stop talking about it in high school, but it lives on as an idea, to the bemusement and occasional frustration of most serious scientists. Sixteen of them, including Dennett, contributed essays in defense of evolution to a small anthology called “Intelligent Thought,” published last week. It was compiled by John Brockman, better known as the editor of the Web site edge.org, the thinking man's Drudge Report.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins deconstructs the claim by ID proponents that the "designer" could he an intelligent alien rather than God, and psychologist Steven Pinker shows how moral sensibility an arise by way of natural selection. "Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists," Dennett concludes, "but Intelligent Design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all." [CLOSE QUOTE] —JERRY ADLER in Newsweek May 29, 2006 p.10

INTELLIGENT DESIGNER CLAIMS TO KNOW GOD'S FOOTIWORK

AND WHO WOULD BE SO NEFARIOUS AS TO DO THAT?

[OPEN QUOTE] "If Diebold had setout to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

Diebold Election Systems spokesperson David Bear says Hursti's [Finnish security expert who analyzed the Diebold machines] findings do not represent a fatal vulnerability in Diebold technology, but simply note the presence of a feature that allows access to authorized technicians to periodically update the software. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. "[Our critics are] throwing out a ‘what if’ that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," says Bear [Diebold spokesperson]. [CLOSE QUOTE] —STEVEN LEVY, Newsweek, May29, 2006 p. 14

MORE SCIENCE. CLEAR AND BEAUTIFUL

This passage that I'm passing on to you is so clear about how environment and adaptation interact. I love reading wonderful passages like the following. It's like this—I think I understand something, but then I read a passage like the following, and I realize that just by shifting a viewpoint to this side or that by a millimeter I see whole new doors of perception opening.

The following by Edward Hagen, "Controversial Issues in Evolutionary Psychology", Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 153-154:

[OPEN QUOTE]

REPRODUCTION AND THE CAUSAL STRUCTURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

For a new, heritable trait to have positive reproductive consequences, it must do something. It must transform the organism or environment in a way that enhances the reproduction of the individuals possessing it. Reproduction is an enormously complex process in which the organism must successfully accomplish thousands of transformations of itself and its environment. Each aspect of the or¬ganism and environment that must be transformed can be transformed in countless ways, yet only a small subset of these transformations furthers the goal of reproduction, with most impeding or preventing it. Virtually all of the ways light striking the lens can be reflected and refracted, for example, will not focus the light on the retina. These transformations—these causal chains—must, therefore, be initiated by adaptations that have the special physical properties required to change things in just the right way. The shape of the lens is exactly that required to focus incident light onto the retina.

Both the things an organism must do to reproduce, as well as those things it could do to enhance reproduction, are called selection pressures, because they either have resulted, or could result, in selection for an adaptation. To increase in frequency, a new heritable trait must improve an organism's ability to effect a particular transformation of the environment, or it must provide an ability to effect a new transformation of the environment. In either case, it must initiate changes that propagate along causal chains—causal chains whose ultimate effects increase the number of offspring of individuals possessing the trait relative to those that do not.*

Crucially, these causal chains are not part of the trait itself. They constitute the essential environmental background, the EEA [environment of evolutionary adaptedness], of the trait. Many such causal chains propagate within the body of the organism, but many also detour far outside it. The feathers on the ruffled grouse, for example, change the spectral and intensity distributions of incident beams of light, reflecting the altered beams. These altered beams strike the retinas of predators, whose brains process the patterns of retinal activation. Depending on whether the light was reflected off uncamouflaged or camouflaged feathers, the neural computations in the predator brains will either recognize or fail to recognize the grouse, and this will either result in claws, beaks, and fangs penetrating the grouse, killing it, or the passing by of the predator, leaving the grouse unscathed.

The spread of camouflage feathers in the grouse population depends critically on the rich, preexisting causal structure of the environment inhabited by the grouse: the colors and patterns of the forest habitat, the types of predators, the structure of their brains, and their hunting strategies. This preexisting causal structure is referred to as the EEA of the camouflage feathers. Because aspects of the causal structure of the environment that are relevant to one adaptation won't necessarily be relevant to another, the EEA is adaptation-specific The grouse feather EEA, for example, is different from the grouse lung EEA (as shorthand, the term EEA is also used to refer to all environmental features that were relevant to an organism's reproduction). Environments change, so the causal structure of the environment an adaptation finds itself in may not correspond to the causal structure the adaptation evolved in; therefore, the adaptation may not work as designed. If the forest changes colors, for example, the camouflage feathers may no longer camouflage the grouse (but its lungs will continue to work just fine).

For humans, some aspects of the modern environment do diverge quite radically from their EEA. Automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes, for example, but people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles because in the EEA, spiders and snakes were a serious threat, whereas automobiles didn't exist. We, therefore, evolved an innate aversion to spiders and snakes but not to automobiles (e.g., Ohman & Mineka, 2001).

If a species' current environment diverges too rapidly and too far from its EEA, the species will go extinct. The human species is clearly not going extinct; hence the common belief that EP claims humans currently live in an entirely novel environment is incorrect. Most aspects of the modern environment closely resemble our EEA. Hearts, lungs, eyes, language, pain, locomotion, memory, the immune system, pregnancy, and the psychologies underlying mating, parenting, friendship, and status all work as advertised-excellent evidence that the modern environment does not radically diverge from the EEA.

_____________________________________________________________

*An adaptation can evolve if it has a positive impact on reproduction on average. It need not have positive impact all the time, nor in every situation, nor even every generation.

[CLOSE QUOTE]

JUST A COUPLE OF JOKES TODAY

Just a coupl'a jokes sent by friends on the Internet.

For your political enjoyment:

John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called pullets and eight or ten roosters, whose job was to fertilize the eggs.

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced.

That took an awful lot of his time so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all!

John went to investigate. The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

But to Farmer John's amazement, Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of Butch, he entered him in the county fair and Butch became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result ... The judges not only awarded Butch the "No Bell Piece Prize" but they also awarded him the "Pulletsurprise" as well.

Clearly Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention?


The World's Shortest Fairy Tale:

Once upon a time, a girl asked a guy, "Will you marry me"?

The guy said, "No".

And the girl lived happily ever after and went shopping, dancing,
drank martinis, always had a clean house, never had to cook, and farted whenever she wanted.

The End

PS: The picture is from a set of old post cards we are selling 3 for a dollar at the little bookstore at the Spokane Public Library where I volunteer to clerk.