LOVEBIRDS IN URBANIA: a photo essay

I pass this almost every day when I drive about, enjoying my wonderful retirement. You can view it yourself from the corner of Trent and Napa in lovely Spokane [or Spookaloo] Washington. And it's much more impressive in person, seeing how high up the job is and imagining how the dude did his deed, probably hanging there in the dark.

Beautiful weeds

Through the Foliage Billy Appears

The Overwhelmingly Big Picture

Focusing In

Billy Everywhere

Billy and Lisa in prison

WAS YOUR VOTE STOLEN
OR LOST?

It’s late, I’m tired, and I haven’t much to add to this article which came to me through the Internet. I’ve given as much credit as I can to the powers that be who published it and to the author, Steven Hill, who wrote it. What more can I do since I’m not getting paid for my blog and I don’t have the money to pay royalties to individual writers, though I would do that if I did have the money and if I was getting any money for being a conduit through which passes information of various kinds. By the way—does the picture I’m including make you feel any more secure? Doesn’t Bush Junior actually look eager, like he wants to be able to read and to comprehend the engraving on the gift his dad is receiving?


[OPEN QUOTE] Election Security 2006

by Steven Hill Look to this site.

June 05, 2006

Steven Hill is director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation. Portions of this article are excerpted from the author’s new book, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. Part I of a two-part series. Part II will outline a forward-looking agenda for how to secure the vote in the United States. Will your vote count on Tuesday? As we head into another election season with control of Congress potentially up for grabs ongoing concerns about voting equipment and election administration continue to worry fair elections advocates. Recent headlines have added to previous fears, but there are also signs that effective advocacy is paying off.

Last month, The New York Times and other news media reported on a new security glitch uncovered in election equipment manufacturer Diebold Election System’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines. Voting technology experts have called it the "worst security flaw ever" any person with basic knowledge and a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways without being detected.

"This [security flaw] is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental," said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting system examiner for the state of Iowa. "In the other ones, we've been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door. Now we find that there's no back door.

Incredibly, media reports withheld some details of the vulnerability at the request of elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting the security hole is so easy that providing details would give a roadmap to a potential hacker.

Elections officials in several states scrambled to limit the risk. In Pennsylvania, respected state elections chief Michael Shamos, previously a supporter of touch-screen voting, ordered the sequestering of all Diebold touch-screens. California and other states invoked emergency procedures. Meanwhile, problems with voting equipment sold by Diebold's main competitors, Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software, popped up in numerous states, including Oregon, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, New Jersey, Washington and New Mexico.

Election Data Services estimates that, while some states are still in the process of buying voting equipment, touch-screen machines will be used by 34 percent of counties in 2006, up from 10 percent in 2000. But only seven states will use devices that print a paper receipt of electronic votes from touch-screen machines known as a “voter verified paper audit trail” or VVPAT with more than a dozen states still pushing legislation to require paper records. This trend is extremely worrying to election security advocates. Some cause for comfort is that 50.2 percent of counties will use optical-scan machines that read hand-marked paper ballots (up from 41 percent in the 2000 election), since at least optical scan systems have a VVPAT a paper ballot that was marked with a pen before being scanned by the machine.

Traditional paper ballots marked by pen and counted by hand, which some touch-screen opponents nostalgically hearken back to, will account for only 5.7 percent of counties in 2006, down from 11.7 percent of counties six years ago. But on the positive side, use of punch-card voting equipment, which was badly discredited during the 2000 presidential vote count in Florida, has declined from 18 percent of counties in 2000 to just under 4 percent.

Two steps forward, one step back? It’s hard to say whether we are making progress or not, mostly because the powers-that-be appear uncertain about what actually represents progress. This was painfully obvious at the Voting Systems Testing Summit in November 2005, which marked the first time that representatives from all the different camps involved with or concerned about election administration top federal regulators, vendors, testing laboratories, state and local election administrators, computer scientists and fair elections advocates came together in one place. Most striking was that no one could articulate a comprehensive inventory of the many problems, much less a blueprint for the solutions. Instead, there was a lot of finger-pointing and excuses.

At the summit, one expert made the staggering claim—which no one bothered to dispute—that the U.S. provides more security, testing, and oversight of slot machines and the gaming industry than to our nation's voting equipment or election administration. Clearly, the biggest threat to the integrity of our elections is that no one seems to be steering the ship. There is no central brain or team that has a handle on all aspects, developing best practices or a roadmap that states and counties can follow. Tragically, while Congress has appropriated $3 billion for buying new voting equipment, the money is arriving before the necessary standards to ensure that it isn’t wasted are in place. This hardly resembles the world’s greatest dem ocracy in action.

Looking at the bigger picture it’s clear that the entire regimen of public-private infrastructure for running elections in the United States, where for-profit vendors sell proprietary equipment to counties and states in a quasi-regulated market, is going through yet another round of convulsions. It's like watching an antiquated bridge creaking and groaning under the strain of traffic, wondering when it will give way next. Any sensible person favoring the fairness and integrity of our elections should be concerned. Yet that concern also must be kept in perspective lest it spiral into a paralyzing paranoia.

There are a number of positives to point to in an admittedly chaotic situation. Election security activists are more mobilized than ever and they are having an impact in a myriad of ways. They have raised the profile of these issues to the point of a national crisis. Their efforts, once considered the actions of fanatical gadflies, are b eing increasingly cited and even joined by respected election bureaucrats like Pennsylvania‚s Michael Shamos. Former President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State James A. Baker III—yes, that James Baker, the Bush family's consigliore in the disputed 2000 presidential election—were co-chairs of the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform which warned in their 2005 final report that software can be modified maliciously before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.

Advocates‚ increased credibility has resulted in real action, with two governors deciding to take matters into their own hands. New Mexico's Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson pushed through legislation mandating paper ballots throughout the state. Maryland's Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich in February called for change after a Johns Hopkins University study found Diebold’s software was open to attacks from hackers, followed by seeing a 10-fold jump in the cost of maintaining and storing the sensitive electronic machines.

In another sign of progress, election security advocates led by Voter Action, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, have found the necessary resources to begin filing lawsuits as a way to block state and election officials' efforts to use touch-screen equipment. So far, lawsuits in nine states have been filed, with the embattled terrain becoming tenser and increasingly high-stakes. Diebold lawyers are not taking this lying down. They have retaliated against whistleblower Stephen Heller, pressuring law enforcement officials in Los Angeles to send him to jail for allegedly leaking documents exposing that Diebold was using illegal, uncertified software in their California voting machines.

As a result of all this furious activity, a consensus is emerging from top to bottom that the system is broken, even if there is not yet a consensus about what to do about it. But increasingly even the more mainstream experts acknowledge that for the 2006 election, the creaky bridge continues on a shaky foundation.

Heading into the 2006 election, fair election advocates need to remain vigilant, particularly in the handful of close races where a swing of a small number of votes could change an election outcome. Longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more visionary agenda that will ensure fair, free, safe and secure elections in the 21st century. [CLOSE QUOTE]

JIMMY STEWART? JUST ANOTHER BUSH-LEAGUE CONSERVATIVE?

We all know that Jimmy Stewart was a conservative. In fact he and Henry Fonda, a liberal friend, almost came to blows over their differences and decided never to talk politics again when together. They were lifelong friends so they must have been true to their agreement. I liked most of Stewart's movies myself.

Stewart was also a war hero. In one of my past blogs, I put in a statement by Andy Rooney about what a standup sort of officer Stewart was. So the following passage may trouble some of Stewart's fans, yet I also think that conservatives are awfully good about speaking platitudes while, when the fat is burning in their own skillets, they fall silent and try to hide the smoke.

I want to add that this biography about Stewart, Pieces of Time: The Life of James Stewart, by Gary Fishgall, has been detailed and full of the usual praise when a biographer genuinely likes his subject. So if Fishgall put in the detail, he must consider it to have some validity. Pieces of Time is not a typical tell all book, certainly not like the negative book I just read about Paul Newman in which every other page was full of negative comments.

[OPEN QUOTE] "I liked taking Marlene out to dinner and to dance back in the days of Destry," Stewart would later recall, adding that they "dated quite a few times, which was fairly romantic." Jim put an innocent spin on the affair, but it was, in fact, intense. Remarque, who followed Dietrich to Hollywood, noted in his diary that the actress confessed she had slept with her costar from the outset of their relationship. Quoting her, Remarque wrote, "It was a dream: it had been magical. For him [Stewart], too."

But Marlene was far more involved than Jimmy. According to Remarque, "She never knew from one week to the next [where she stood with him]. He had never talked about love, but told her he was not in love, couldn't afford it." Then, she told the writer, she became pregnant with Stewart's child. Remarque noted in his diary that she wanted to have the baby, but that Jim insisted she have an abortion. She acceded to his wishes, traveling to New York for the then illegal operation. Stewart, the writer noted, neither went East with Marlene nor monitored her condition by phone. "She was not even angry with him," he added. "She blamed herself for getting pregnant."

Beyond Remarque's diary, Steven Bach wrote in his 1992 biography of Dietrich that "Maria [Riva] told people who would listen that Stewart had made Marlene pregnant during the making of Destry, that Marlene confronted him with the fact on a dance floor in Hollywood, that Stewart (unmarried) walked away without a word, and that Marlene (married) did what women do who don't want unexpected souvenirs of romance. Curiously, in her own book about her mother, hardly a flattering portrait, Riva wrote virtually nothing about Dietrich's relationship with Stewart and avoided the pregnancy issue entirely.

Given Stewart's squeaky-clean image and conservative values, some might find such a story difficult to accept, but it is credible. If there was a flaw in Jim's character, it was that he was not a standup guy. Yes, he believed in the sanctity of the family, and certainly, in later years, he was antiabortion but he clung to notions without reflection; he simply accepted them. But fight for them? Take risks for them? Not likely. The fact is that, aside from his military service during World War II, Stewart never fought hard for anything. Career, money, women, friends, they all came pretty easily. As a rather affable, unassertive person, he preferred to sit back and let good things come his way. When something untoward did happen, such as Dietrich's pregnancy, he would have been inclined to ignore the whole matter, to drive it from his mind. If one doesn't think about something, doesn't do anything about it, it arguably didn't happen. [Can I say here to think of George Bush? My comment, not Gary Fishgall's.]

In later years, Dietrich remembered Stewart as something of a vacuous character. In her 1987 autobiography, she chose to ignore their personal relationship entirely—it is a very sanitized book—but she observed "obviously, his sense of humor was poorly developed. He performed his way throughout his life and became very rich and very famous." She also noted, "The only really admirable actor with whom I worked was Spencer Tracy." [CLOSE QUOTE] (p.139)

There it is. All the nasty details. I don't mind conservatives having values they want to defend, but this duplicity on their part is troubling. Just today I was thinking about the Clinton impeachment, how atrocious that preceding was, and no one has come forward to impeach Big Brother George! The hypocrisy reeks! There's no comparison between what Clinton was impeached for and what Bush could be thought guilty of. At least an impeachment proceeding would get some details out in the open.

Photo above in this posting is another picture of a landscape detail southwest of Spokane, Washington.

OIL OIL OIL O O OIVEY OIVEY (or HOWEVER YOU SPELL THAT LAST WORD!)

The following column is from Newsweek, April 24, 2006, p.45:

[OPEN QUOTE] The U.S lives in an energy trap. We fell into it gladly, dug it deeper and sit fat and happy, with blinders on. We're fed daily meals of imported oil, from countries we pay in IOUs and think we can push around. But now we're starting to see the costs and risks of our dependency—and I don't only mean gasoline averaging $2.74 a gallon at the pump. [Wasn’t that a long time ago!]

For years to come, we'll be in the hands of some of the most dysfunctional governments in the world. Oil prices will rise [she got that right] and economic growth will slow—not this year, but almost certainly a few years out. We'll be paying in both treasure and blood, as we fight and parley to keep ever-tighter supplies of world oil flowing our way.

What has changed in the world? We're running out of the capacity to produce surpluses of oil. [Should read, ‘Have run out.”] Demand for crude is expected to rise much faster than new supplies. Developing nations, such as China and India, are glugging barrels at astounding rates. Meanwhile, most producer nations can't find enough new oil, or drill out more from their reserves, to replace what we're using up. Production from most of the large, older fields is in irreversible decline. About three years from now, the non-OPEC world will start pumping at slowly diminishing rates, says energy analyst Charles Maxwell of Weeden & Co. Most of the extra barrels needed to feed our economic growth will then have to come from OPEC nations—putting them in the driver's seat. Saudi Arabia is stepping up drilling and development, but the volatile market price suggests that it still won't have much capacity to spare. Within 10 or 15 years, it too may not pump enough to meet increased demand.

That puts the oil-dependent countries in a serious bind. We're all jockeying for control of oilfields, in a vast game that runs the risk of turning mean. China and Japan are running warships near disputed oil and natural-gas deposits in the East China Sea. China is doing deals in Sudan, Venezuela and Iran (our "bad guys"). Russia looks less friendly as we continue to invest in the oil countries around the Caspian Sea—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan.

Nobody really knows how much oil there is. State-run companies don't disclose their true reserves. But clearly there's not enough to cover long supply disruptions, and that puts future economic development at increasing risk. "Terrorists have identified oil as the Achilles' heel of the West,” says Gal Luft, head of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. The world market is losing maybe 1.5 million barrels a day to political sabotage. In February, the Saudis foiled an attack on one of their major oil installations. Had it succeeded, it could have been an "energy Pearl Harbor,” Luft says. No one can foresee how world markets would respond if we attack Iran, but traders are clearly running scared (oil touched $70 a barrel last week).

This throws our Iraq wars into a different light. To an extent that most Americans don't yet understand, the U.S. military has become a "global oil-protection force," says Michael Klare, an expert on natural-resource wars and author of the book Blood and Oil. President Jimmy Carter declared the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to be a vital U.S. interest, enforced at the point of a gun, if necessary. Today, we patrol tanker routes not only in the gulf, but in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Troops and advisers help protect pipelines in chaotic countries such as Colombia and the Republic of Georgia. We're planting military bases near oil supplies in Asia and Africa. Gulf War I was billed as a war to save Saudi oilfields from Saddam Hussein. Gulf War II was elevated to a "war against terror". But it's arguably still about oil—the Carter Doctrine reigns. One of the prizes in Iraq was to have been British and American access to its huge and unexploited oil reserves, Klare says.

What does all this add up to? A future oil market drastically rationed by price. Farmers, truckers and people on lower incomes who have to drive to work will be squeezed, especially if they also need oil to heat their homes. But heating with natural gas won't save you either, says oil investment banker Matthew Simmons; natural gas supplies may grow even tighter and even higher priced.

On paper, we have alternatives, such as liquefied coal, oil sands from Canada and ethanol. But they're not anywhere close to production on a massive scale. For a smooth transition, mega-energy projects need to get started at least 20 years before oil supplies decline, writes Robert Hirsch of the consulting firm Salk in a study prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy. If we don't get a running start on the problem, he says, "the economic consequences will be dire." We're probably already behind. It takes leadership to address a potential crisis in advance.

Unfortunately, we're investing in war, not in crash projects to develop new energy sources. Maybe there's time to spare. But some events, like true civil war and collapse in Iraq, could change everything in a day. We're running a faith-based energy policy-still addicted to oil. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong big. —Jane Bryant Quinn (With reporters: TEMMA EHRENFELD with RAMIN SETOODEH) [CLOSE QUOTE]

THESE CONSERVATIVE TIMES

The following is the lead-in to a story that could only come during times when nobody feels financially secure. What with everybody and anybody telling us that we need an awful lot of money in order to retire and what with everybody having been talked into the investment world, and given that under the Bushite regime no one can feel safe anymore because Bush’s entire regime has been dedicated to destroying the feeling of security that a safety net gave all of us—even if we didn’t need it, we could still know it was there—these kinds of schemes were bound to multiply. Current America reminds me of a Charles Dickens sort of world or a backwoods Mark Twain one, full of con men and gullible fools. I don’t think things have been so bad for average Americans since the Depression. Thank you, Mr. Texan Bush.

[OPEN QUOTE] Monday July 17, 6:31 PM EDT

By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Forty investment firms across America's Sun Belt are under federal examination over so-called "free lunch" investment seminars that target elderly victims, authorities said on Monday.

In six states with large retiree populations, the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking hard at seminars where seniors get a free meal and a hard sell for investments that can range from inappropriate to fraudulent.

"Regulators are now examining 40 firms and more firms have been identified for examinations," said Lori Richards, director of the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations at a conference on senior fraud. She did not name the firms.

At the conference, a study was released with a finding that surprised some officials -- elderly victims of investment fraud seem to be more financially literate than non-victims. . . .

©2005 Reuters Limited. [CLOSE QUOTE]


RIGHT WING MEDIA HARMS CONSERVATIVE INTEGRITY

The short passage below comes to you from a columnist deep inside the NY Times:

“When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.” —Nicholas D. Kristof

You can read the entire column at if you are rich enough to pay online for all the media that has the news you want to read. But who has that kind of money? The day is coming when news will be available only to the rich. That day will come when you can no longer go into a coffee shop, a doctor’s office, etcetera and read a used hard copy of USA Today or the NY Times or your local paper or any magazine or paper. Hard copies will be as extinct as the dodo bird.

HERE’S SOME MORE BASICS ON THE BRAIN
BY LEDA COSMIDES AND JOHN TOOBY

[OPEN QUOTE] Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

The brain is a physical system whose operation is governed solely by the laws of chemistry and physics. What does this mean? It means that all of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and feelings are produced by chemical reactions going on in your head (a sobering thought). The brain's function is to process information. In other words, it is a computer that is made of organic (carbon-based) compounds rather than silicon chips. The brain is comprised of cells: primarily neurons and their supporting structures. Neurons are cells that are specialized for the transmission of information. Electrochemical reactions cause neurons to fire.

Neurons are connected to one another in a highly organized way. One can think of these connections as circuits -- just like a computer has circuits. These circuits determine how the brain processes information, just as the circuits in your computer determine how it processes information. Neural circuits in your brain are connected to sets of neurons that run throughout your body. Some of these neurons are connected to sensory receptors, such as the retina of your eye. Others are connected to your muscles. Sensory receptors are cells that are specialized for gathering information from the outer world and from other parts of the body. (You can feel your stomach churn because there are sensory receptors on it, but you cannot feel your spleen, which lacks them.) Sensory receptors are connected to neurons that transmit this information to your brain. Other neurons send information from your brain to motor neurons. Motor neurons are connected to your muscles; they cause your muscles to move. This movement is what we call behavior.

Organisms that don't move, don't have brains. Trees don't have brains, bushes don't have brains, flowers don't have brains. In fact, there are some animals that don't move during certain stages of their lives. And during those stages, they don't have brains. The sea squirt, for example, is an aquatic animal that inhabits oceans. During the early stage of its life cycle, the sea squirt swims around looking for a good place to attach itself permanently. Once it finds the right rock, and attaches itself to it, it doesn't need its brain anymore because it will never need to move again. So it eats (resorbs) most of its brain. After all, why waste energy on a now useless organ? Better to get a good meal out of it.

In short, the circuits of the brain are designed to generate motion—behavior—in response to information from the environment. The function of your brain—this wet computer—is to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances. [CLOSE QUOTE]

O’REILLY IS NOT ONE OF “THEM”

How many of you have watched “The Colbert Report” on the Comedy Central Network? In a current Newsweek (Feb. 13, 2006) article, O’Reilly, being his usually dense, pompous self, does not catch his own self-satire when he says of the satirist, “He [Colbert] does it [satirize O’Reilly] without being mean-spirited, which is a refreshing change. . . . Ninety percent of them are just vicious and they use their platform to injure people. . . .”

So who are the mean-spirited “them” who use their platform to injure people that O’Reilly is recognizing? It does take one to know one, doesn’t it?

MURDOCH IS NOT CHANGING CHANGING AT ALL!

Murdoch now owns “Myspace”, the Internet social networking portal. About his newly purchased clients who fear he may change their environment, Murdoch says, “They feel they own ‘Myspace’ and that the big corporation was going to come in and change it. Well, we haven’t.” A few lines before that, Murdoch said, “”We’ve also got a third of our force monitoring the site to prevent inappropriate material from being posted.” Yep, Big Murdoch is watching you peons.
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THE LOCAL RAG SHOWS IT'S COLORS

The following paragraph is a letter to the editor waiting for submission until I'm allowed to next publish. The occasion is a very nice report the Spokesman made on how many households are starting to live smaller because their incomes, under the Bush administration, just aren't keeping up with the salaries of CEOs and other friends of the Bush mis-administration. Of course the paper didn't get into the meat of the causes of the end of the American dream as I just have. But what really burned my muffins was the paper's mentioning several times how Christian churches are setting up programs to teach the Bushites how to live smaller and conserve money. The paper even mentioned Biblical references which can be construed to teach Christians that they must live smaller and be conservationists. No mention of any other religion in the piece that I can recall at the time of this writing. The letter next below expresses my feelings even more keenly.


"Your report on The Big Squeeze (July 9) was informative, but why the extraneous mentions of Christianity in essentially an economic report? By that pandering approach to outworn reality, your piece fails to emphasize the underlying impulse to frugality which is that good old adaptively-evolved, psychological force—fear—of homelessness, nakedness, hunger and consequent death. Nor does it encourage the many scientifically-minded skeptics who, in the Sixties, began talking about the resource conservation that Christians are just now discovering. Your piece fails to acknowledge atheists like myself and Buddhist wife who, without resort to Bible commandments, drive fuel efficient cars, don’t carry credit card balances and live in a 900 square foot, energy-efficient home within city limits. Most importantly, your report, by acknowledging the irrational religious to the exclusion of rational others, fails to trumpet the skeptical attitude that makes decisions based on scientifically discoverable information rather than Biblical authoritarianism—the kind of factual information that also leads to accepting the fact of evolution and the nonexistence of a supernatural heavenly hypothetical that watches over the human animal. Your report, by failing to ignore theosophy, encourages more superstitious Biblical authoritarianism in future rather than empirical approaches to human problems."

OTHER UNIVERSES NEARLY CONFIRMED

Before you read the following excerpt, let me admit that much of the essay from which the excerpt is taken is way beyond my understanding. The only reason I pass this excerption is because it is a simple proof that I can understand, and so I pass it on expecting that you also will be able to understand it. Maybe some of you can go far beyond this. The passage reveals a series of considerations by which parallel universes can perhaps be predicted to exist. What I specially like about the passage is the same elegance of thought we’ve seen in other scientific lines of reasoning that I’ve copied into other posts. I hope you enjoy these paragraphs as much as I did. I’m always overjoyed when I my limited capabilities are able to follow an exemplary line of reasoning. My MFA in Creative Writing did not prepare me for the beautiful paths of reason these paragraphs reveal, though a beautiful poem has a logic of its own too. But I must also add that more than one scientist I've come across in my reading points out that these sorts of proof are more philosophy than science.

The following excerpt is an essay, “Parallel Universes”, by Max Tegmark (Dept. of Physics at Univ. of Pennsylvania) which appeared in Science and Ultimate Reality: From Quantum to Cosmos, Cambridge University Press (2003).

[OPEN QUOTE] Physicists dislike unexplained coincidences. Indeed, they interpret them as evidence that models are ruled out. In Section IC, we saw how the open universe model was ruled out at 99.9% confidence because it implies that the observed pattern of CMB fluctuations [cosmic microwave background—the stuff left over from the Big Bang] is extremely unlikely, a one-in-a thousand coincidence occurring in only 0.1% of all Hubble volumes [the volume of our universe made visible by the Hubble telescope].

Suppose you check into a hotel, are assigned room 1967 and, surprised, note that that this is the year you were born. After a moment of reflection, you conclude that this is not all that surprising after all, given that the hotel has many rooms and that you would not be having these thoughts in the first place if you'd been assigned another one. You then realize that even if you knew nothing about hotels, you could have inferred the existence of other hotel rooms, because if there were only one room number in the entire universe, you would be left with an unexplained coincidence.

As a more pertinent example, consider M, the mass of the Sun. M affects the luminosity of the Sun, and using basic physics, one can compute that life as we know it on Earth is only possible if M is in the narrow range 1.6 x 10 to the 30 power kg - 2.4 x 10 to the 30 power kg—otherwise Earth's climate would be colder than on Mars or hotter than on Venus [therefore uninhabitable]. The measured value is M ~ 2.0 x 10 to the 30 power kg. This apparent coincidence of the habitable and observed M-values may appear disturbing given that calculations show that stars in the much broader mass range M ~ 10 to the 29 power kg - 10 to the 32 power kg can exist. However, just as in the hotel example, we can explain this apparent coincidence if there is an ensemble and a selection effect: if there are in fact many solar systems with a range of sizes of the central star and the planetary orbits, then we obviously expect to find ourselves living in one of the inhabitable ones.

More generally, the apparent coincidence of the habitable and observed values of some physical parameter can be taken as evidence for the existence of a larger ensemble, of which what we observe is merely one member among many (Carter 1973). Although the existence of other hotel rooms and solar systems is uncontroversial and observationally confirmed, that of parallel universes is not, since they cannot be observed. Yet if fine-tuning is observed, one can argue for their existence using the exact same logic as above. Indeed, there are numerous examples of fine tuning suggesting parallel universes with other physical constants, although the degree of fine tuning is still under active debate and should be clarified by additional calculations—see Rees (2002) and Davies (1982) for popular accounts and Barrow & Tipler (1986) for technical details. [CLOSE QUOTE]

DON’T BE A DINGBAT

According to a recent AP report which appeared on the Internet, size matters. “A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains. . . .

“ ‘The study offers evidence that males, at least in some species make an evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess, said David Hoskens, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in England and a leading authority on bats' mating behavior. . . .’

“ ‘If female bats mate with more than one male, a sperm competition begins,’ Pitnick said. ‘The male who ejaculates the greatest number of sperm wins the game, and hence many bats have evolved outrageously big testes.’

The AP report goes on to say, “Promiscuity is known to make a difference in testicle size in some other mammals. For example, chimpanzees are promiscuous and have testicles that are many times larger than those of gorillas, in which a single dominant male has exclusive access to a harem of females.”

You see, the study of biology isn’t all boring when one can come across such facts as these. But what’s a poor woman to do? If she’s the faithful sort, she won’t have as much fun, but if she’s the running around type, she gets a snugger fit. Of course, these findings relate only to the batty ones among us.

WELL . . . MAYBE I’D GET IT if
I WERE A PRISON SPOKESPERSON or
A CONSERVATIVE PRISON SPOKESPERSON or
WORKED FOR BILL O’REILLY AT THE FOX IN THE BUSH NETWORK

Recently, an elderly 76 year old death row inmate asked the prison to just let him die if he went into cardiac arrest which he thought he might likely do. But the prison informed him, “At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life. We would resuscitate him.” Allen was executed, as planned, at age 76. Good for him. He wouldn’t want to challenge the compassionate conservative types among his executioners. This is according to a small passage in Newsweek, Feb. 6, 2005, p.?

MORE SEX, AND THIS TIME HUMAN SEXUALITY

"Our blood holds the secrets to who we are, and, increasingly, individuals, families and research scientists are using genetic testing to tell us what we don't already know. Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical; we are far more similar than diverse. But that tiny 0.1 percent difference holds clues to our ancestries, the roots of all human migration and even our propensity for disease . . . .

"Our most recent ancestors—a genetic "Adam" and "Eve"—have been traced back to Africa, and other intriguing forebears are being discovered all over the map. Last month one group of scientists found that 40 percent of the world's Ashkenazi Jews descend from just four women; another reported that one in five males in northwest Ireland may be a descendant of a legendary fifth-century warlord." From Newsweek (Feb. 6, pp. 48-49)

This last paragraph about the warlord who probable spread his genes far and wide as a rite of conquest reminds me of a line from Mel Brooks's movie, “History of the World, Part Two”. Mel, playing one of the Kings Louis says soto voce to the camera, after fondling a nymphet, "It's good to be the king."

Another interesting reflection as one studies the findings that trace our ancestors all about the globe is that if you accept that we can track our ancestors back that far using genes, then the next step back down the gene trail is monkeys or that ancestor we shared with monkeys. If you accept this much you gotta accept the whole gene to monkey package.

SOME PRETTY PICTURES

These are some more photos from Spokane's perennial garden at Manito Park. Enjoy. It was a beautiful warm day as I took them. A bit muggy for Spokane, but okay. Enjoy the weekend.



































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THEY CAN THANK BUSH FOR CHAVEZ

Since we can thank Bush for the move to the left in governments all over the world (Mexico's close call counts too!) as well as the move toward terrorism of so many of the Moslem world’s youth (see Somalia), Venezuela can thank Bush for the good fortune they are receiving, courtesy of their awareness of the decidedly uncompassionate conservativism of America’s president.

“Yet even Chavez's most outspoken' critics readily admit that his charisma and revolutionary rhetoric have touched a chord with many of Venezuela's poor, who represent 54 percent of the population and have long been shut out of the country's political and economic life. ‘A lot of poor people feel understood and represented by Chavez,’ says Perez Vivas, ‘even if they don't receive anything.’ ” — US News and World Report, Jan. 30, 2006, p. 27



Photo is of a small segment of Spokane's perennial garden at Manito Park.

MORE TO THANK BUSH FOR IN IRAQ

I tell you—it can't be more than a few months more and things will be going so well in Iraq that we can get up and leave.

[OPEN QUOTE] Abu Mohammed can't go near a hospital now. The Iraqi bone specialist, 37, has lived in fear since August, when his younger brother, also a doctor, was shot dead one night while walking home from his clinic in Baghdad. Abu Mohammed bought a pistol after that, but he still doesn't feel safe. Recently he was offered a managerial job at one of the city's biggest hospitals. He's scared to accept it. His wife owned a pharmacy; she sold it in November. A week or so ago a doctor friend of theirs was kidnapped from his clinic in the city's Mansour district—the latest of their friends to vanish. "My brother was killed when the terrorists started a campaign against doctors," says Abu Mohammed. "He was one of their victims."

Iraq's troubles just keep getting crueler. The same American officials who used to promise imminent victory are now saying openly that the insurgency seems likely to continue indefinitely. The recent elections, rather than creating a sense of common ground, only emphasized the country's deepening rifts. And all the while, the insurgents are attacking the social structure wherever its defenses are weakest, aiming to create chaos so hopeless that America will finally give up and go home. Now they are targeting the health-care system with murders, kidnappings and scare tactics. According to the Iraqi Doctors Association, at least 65 physicians were killed in 2005—more than double the total for either of the previous two years—while others were kidnapped or threatened with death. Hundreds have fled the country. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Newsweek, Jan. 16, 2006, p. 36.

GLAXOSMITHKLINE and FEAR

I saw a print ad recently by the drug company mentioned in the title of this segment. Two huge sentences at the top of the ad say it all:

"EXPERTS SAY 10% OF THE WORLD'S DRUG SUPPLY IS COUNTERFEIT.
CAN WE BE SURE WE IMPORT THE 90% THAT ISN'T?"

I wonder why a major American drug company would put out a strange ad like that one? The reason eludes me, doesn't it you?

STEVEN PINKER ON EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

From the moment I first read Freud in my youth, I was hooked on psychology, but as my life ground on with probably a lot more pain and suffering than was necessary, and as I argued with friends and enemies about "the human condition", I had to admit, as Steven Pinker discusses below, that psychology didn't give me the firmly founded answers that I craved about why humans are as they are and about why I am as I am. Questions like why are people cruel, why are we selfish, why do humans make war, were not answered with any satisfaction though I loved to adopt one viewpoint or another and argue its truth as if my very life depended on it. But all the while, in the depths of heated argument, I knew that I wasn't quite as certain about my points as I wanted to be.

Steven Pinker in his "Forward" to The Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology doesn't mention arguing, but he does mention the absence of satisfying explanation that traditional psychology gave him but which evolutionary psychology does give him. Finally, we can say, science has made its way into psychology. Here’s Steven Pinker:

[OPEN QUOTE] For many years after I decided to become a psychologist I was frustrated by my chosen field, and fantasized about a day when it would satisfy the curiosity that first led me to devote my professional life to studying the mind. As with many psychology students, the frustration began with my very first class, in which the instructor performed the ritual that begins every introduction to psychology course: disabusing students of the expectation that they would learn about any of the topics that attracted them to the subject. Forget about love and hate, family dynamics, and jokes and their relation to the unconscious, they said. Psychology was a rigorous science which investigated quantifiable laboratory phenomena; it had nothing to do with self-absorption on an analyst's couch or the prurient topics of daytime talk shows. And in fact the course confined itself to "perception," which meant psychophysics, and "learning," which meant rats, and "the brain," which meant neurons, and "memory," which meant nonsense syllables, and "intelligence," which meant IQ tests, and "personality," which meant personality tests.

When I proceeded to more advanced courses, they only deepened the disappointment by revealing that the psychology canon was a laundry list of unrelated phenomena. The course on perception began with Weber's Law and Fechner's Law and proceeded to an assortment of illusions and aftereffects familiar to readers of cereal boxes. There was no there—no conception of what perception is or of what it is for. Cognitive psychology, too, consisted of laboratory curiosities analyzed in terms of dichotomies such as serial/parallel, discrete/analog, and top-down/bottom-up (inspiring Alan Newell's famous jeremiad, "You can't play twenty questions with nature and win"). To this day, social psychology is driven not by systematic questions about the nature of sociality in the human animal but by a collection of situations in which people behave in strange ways.

But the biggest frustration was that psychology seemed to lack any sense of explanation. Like the talk show guest on Monty Python's Flying Circus whose theory of the brontosaurus was that "the brontosaurus is skinny at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and skinny at the other end," psychologists were content to "explain" a phenomenon by redescribing it. A student rarely enjoyed the flash of insight which tapped deeper principles to show why something had to be the way it is as opposed to some other way it could have been. [CLOSE QUOTE]

In the words of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby who were in at the beginning of this field of study: “Evolutionary psychology can therefore be seen as the inevitable intersection of the computationalism of the cognitive revolution with the adaptationism of William's evolutionary biology: Because mental phenomena are the expression of complex functional organization in biological systems, and complex organic functionality is the downstream consequence of natural selection, then it must be case that the sciences of the mind and brain are adaptationist science, and psychological mechanisms are computational adaptations. In this way, the marriage of computationalism with adaptationism marks a major turning point in the history of ideas, dissolving the intellectual tethers that had limited fundamental progress and opening the way forward. Like Dalton's wedding of atomic theory to chemistry, computationalism and adaptationism solve each other's deepest problems, and open up new continents of scientific possibility (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett, 2003, 2005)." Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Page 10)

The photo is of the scablands in these here parts. I like to drive around in this country and gawk. The photo is as it is because the sky was full of sunshine but the earth was in shadow. It makes a contrast which some would say is unprofessional, but, hey, I'm not a professional, and I like what I see here.

KNIGHTS AND MAIDENS


[OPEN QUOTE]
CHIVALRY IS NOT A WORD NORMALLY ASSOCIATED WITH terrorism, at least not in the West. But the world in which Osama bin Laden would like to live, and the vision that inspires so many of his followers, is literally about days of old when knights were bold—and fair maidens were kept behind veils, their virtue protected, their lives entirely controlled by men. Since the 1990s, bin Laden has cast his fight as one against "crusaders," and the most important ideological tract by his right-hand man, Zawahiri, bears the title "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner."

While gender roles are evolving in many of today's societies, Al Qaeda has hoped to freeze them in a time of feudal traditions. Many of the organization's leaders have been intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and engineers who are perfectly at home with other aspects of modernity. But they differ violently with the West about the way women should be allowed to participate in daily life, viewing females as chattel in some cases, as revered mothers in others and almost always as icons to be protected from outside influences. In jihadist propaganda, the invasion and violation of Muslim lands is intimately tied to the violation of Muslim women, either directly or through the corrupting role of Western values [Christian fundamentalists excluded] and attitudes. In its 1988 covenant, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas laid out its view of "the Muslim woman" as "the maker of men" and the educator of future generations—the person who prepares future fighters. "The enemies have realized the importance of her role," says the fundamentalist manifesto. "They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle."

In fact, many Arab and Muslim men, not just jihadists, see foreign occupation as a form of emasculation. (Just weeks after Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, Qasim Alsabti, the cosmopolitan owner of a Baghdad art gallery, told Newsweek the U.S. occupation was "part of a plan to steal our souls—to castrate us.") Years under Israeli rule have broken down the structures of Palestinian families. "The image of the strong, providing father who can protect his women and children has been badly damaged and the male role has been eroded away," says Dr. Eyad Sarraj, director of Gaza Community Mental Health. That opens the way for radical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to teach young boys that the way to be real men is to be religious—and to be ready to die. [CLOSE QUOTE] —Newsweek (Dec. 12, 2005)

Except for American fundamentalists, most modernized world populations have surrendered a backward notion of the difference between men and women. We learned that to hold those ideas is to enslave women. There is nothing more sinister than the man who wants to “protect” his woman. It’s obvious in how Moslem men “protect” their women in all sorts of abusive ways. How often protection in the hands of a fundamentalist turns into enslavement, eh? Not always, but often enough to make it an idea which doesn’t belong in a democracy even though some women gladly give up their freedoms in order to feel protected. Come to think of it that’s another reason why so many fundamentalists can’t find it in them to oppose Mr. Bush. They’ll sell out freedom to feel safe. Where’s their god when we need it?

Here’s another little story with an interesting moral from the same article in Newsweek (Dec. 12, 2005, p. 29):

[OPEN QUOTE] . . . in late 2001, an aging mujahed named Sufi Abdul Aziz Baba was given the task of caring for the widows of 22 Qaeda fighters. As casualties mounted among the men, the number of women in the group continued to grow. On the run from the Americans, they hid out in a compound in the southeastern province of Paktika. The women—Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs—were given Kalashnikovs to defend themselves, and soon began training within the compound walls, out of sight of the men. Forced to flee again across the border into Pakistan, they fought a three-hour gun battle against the forces of an Afghan warlord who had gone over to the American side. A year later, to avoid an offensive by Pakistani troops, the women fled again to a new hideout near the Afghan border, Baba told Newsweek. All the while, they continued military training. Last year a new Pakistani offensive forced these women, now well versed in the arts of killing, to disperse again along the Afghan frontier. There, says Baba, they are supported by a tightly woven network of jihadist organizations and family ties.

Indeed, in these remote lands Al Qaeda's fighters and their wives and widows often seem to be part of one extended family. Frequently the sisters and daughters of a holy warrior will marry one of his comrades in arms. The widows of slain guerrillas commonly wed one of their late husband's jihadist relatives. Although these networks appear isolated, they could form an enduring core of Al Qaeda in the future, or a new incarnation of it. And some of the women among them are now more than ready to take up arms, or to carry bombs, whenever the organization needs them. Or whenever the men are gone, or get out of the way. As Mia Bloom writes in a forthcoming book, "The underlying message conveyed by female bombers is: Terrorism has moved beyond a fringe phenomenon and insurgents are all around you." But that is only the message for their enemies. In their own world, their willingness to carry out suicide attacks means something different. Among Palestinians, for instance, "the idea of violence empowering women has spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip," writes Bloom. Suicide bombing is changing the rules of deference and subservience that have dominated the traditional society—a strange path to liberation for women hidden behind veils and burgas. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Liberated by violence? Stranger and stranger yet!

The photo comes from a short afternoon drive we took into the scabland and wheat fields of the country Southwest of Spokane.