JUST GOT BACK . . . .

Spent two days with my youngest son in Paulsbo. We drove down to Portland to watch an improv group that Patrick likes. At Halloween, they do a comedy horror and science fiction show. I took some pictures on my trip. They’ll also find their way onto this blog. Here’s a picture of my son now where we ate dinner in Portland.

SOMETIMES I DO
THINK ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL MATTERS

To select and scan into my blog passages like these, and the ones from science, literature and philosophy too, is one of the great pleasures of blogging.

In the following passages from The Farfarers by Farley Mowat, one gets a real sense of the changes which fish stocks have undergone from a thousand years back to current times. In this book, Mowat's main purpose is to argue that people he calls Albans preceded the Norsemen in finding North America. The whole adventure, like so many of his books, takes us right into the lives of the people he imagines so well and clearly and allows us to share in their lives of danger as they go about their days and years as crofters (home steaders) and valuta (tusk ivory) seekers. Mowat argues that these valuta seekers were constantly forced out from their places, beginning in England, forced constantly westward, by Norse invaders until they found North America. It's an interesting and exciting tale just as so many of Farley Mowat's naturalist tales are.


[OPEN QUOTE] [In Newfoundland] seal products, whether fresh meat, rendered oil, or sun- or fire dried flesh, provided the Tunits' staple food. They also caught salmon and other fishes; took seabirds and their eggs (more than two hundred great auk mandibles were found in one Port au Choix grave); and lobsters that, as late as 1906, were still so abundant in St. John Bay they kept ten canning factories busy. Shellfish and berries were collected in quantity, and Tunit hunted caribou, which formerly came down in great numbers from the Long Range Mountains to winter along the coastal plains. . . .

On a September day in 1996, Claire and I stopped at the eerily silent fishing village of Boswarlos on the south shore of Tusker Bay to chat with the only person we could find—an elderly fisherman brooding over his gear. He told us the bay was now virtually abandoned.

"Not enough fish left out there to keep the gulls from starvin' I hauled seven nets this mornin' and got four little mackerel, no more'n would feed me cat! 'Tis all fished out! Hard to believe, maybe, but they was even walrus here once—found their teeth and bones meself out on Shoal Point. And whales a-plenty. Even in my time porpoises was still thick as berries. And fish. . . cod used to drive in here chasin' the capelin and herring like a spring tide! Fill your nets so full they'd sink to the bottom! And lobsters! When I were a lad they was two, three hundred lobster men in the bay, all makin'a livin'. Nowadays they's no more'n a dozen, and every one of them hard put to land the price of a case of beer!"

Port au Port Bay, St. George's Bay, and adjacent waters were once alive with fish—and with fishermen. Fifteenth-century Basque and Portuguese barks and whalers were followed here by fleets of French then English smacks and then by flocks of white-winged American, Canadian, and Newfoundland schooners. These were succeeded in their turn by motor seiners, long liners, trawlers, and, finally, by the ultimate fish killer of all—the stern dragger.

They are all gone now. During our visit Claire and I saw not one fishing vessel at work on all the vast sweep of salt water bordering southwestern Newfoundland. Those once astoundingly fecund waters have been so drained of life that there is no longer any profit to be made from them.

Which is not the way it was a thousand years ago. [CLOSE QUOTE]


"Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect." —Steven Wright [If you know Wright and his delivery style, you get the humor of this more clearly.]

WWJD—THE PARTY GAME

Have you heard about the new party game called WWJD? It’s a guess what “J” stands for game in which various people, places and things are substituted for the “J” in “What would J________ do?”

For example, the person who’s It will keep in mind, let’s say, the word, “Jell-O”. He will then give out clues until someone guesses what he has in mind. His clues must be relevant to the word he has in mind or he receives no points, and he gets points according to how many clues he must give out—the more the better—before the other players guess his word. He will try to make his clues as mysterious as possible, but the clues must be accurate. The other players will decide if his clues have been valid after the word is revealed. And the clue must answer exactly what the sentence asks, “What would J________ do?”

He might say, “It wobbles.” See? “What would Jell-O do?” Wobble?

Next he might say, “It takes on many colors,” or “It likes to be colorful,” as in “What would Jell-o do?”

Next he’ll hint that “It catches cold to make it firm,” as in “What would Jell-o do?” Other players might object to catches when they find out that “J” stands for Jell-o, but that adds to the fun of the game.

Next—“Sometimes it gets a little fruity,” as in “What would Jell-o do?” See? Get fruity—people put fruit in Jell-o all the time. Very creative and inventive game.

On and on—“It likes to wear a hat of whipped cream.”

And—“It loves to swim in milk.”

All these answer the question “What would Jell-o do?”

There are lot’s of Js in the world, people places and things, so have fun. Let your hair down and play the new party game [I just invented] WWJD or WHAT WOULD J________ DO?


SPEAKING OF FRUITY JELL-O, HERE’S “THE J______ WHO COULDN’T SPELL”

In Idaho, Post Falls, all sorts of people crawl out from under the rocks. In fact, Idaho is loaded with such people no matter how hard the minority of good folk over there resist them. It’s an archly conservative state, very much like the very worst of our Southern states, so of course, slugs find a lot of rocks to live under in Idaho. Good place to be if you’re rich, not so good if you’re poor. Speaking of slugs under rocks—Orrin Hatch, the very conservative Senator from Idaho’s neighboring state of Utah, is a slug of a different color. You should read the hatchet job he did on Anita Hill in her book, Speaking Truth To Power. He prejudged the case and decided to assassinate her character rather than get at the truth. I remember him well, now that my memory’s been refreshed. He dismissed sexual harassment and her experience as if they were nothing to him, and, now, because of him and a few others, we’ve got a liar sitting on the highest court of the land, one small piece of a looming conservative majority. The SR, our local paper, even has a senior editor (who lives in Idaho and who will remain anonymous) who just might agree with Valentine’s hateful and ignorant position. Possibly that editor’s literate, but Jim Valentine’s ignorant illiteracy stands out for all to see, right there on his loathsome sign. It’s a common mistake. I make it sometimes by accident, but something tells me that Jimmy-boy doesn’t know a contraction from a possessive case of “you”.

PS: Look at the schnoz on that Son of a Baal!

Speaking of Idaho and its comparison to the South (and the racism that underpins the Republican Party and religious conservatism there and elsewhere), look at the emblem of racism the J sports on his cap. Recall the game? WWJ[im]D? He'd wear a Confederate flag on his his head. He sums it all up for us—racism in the conservative heart, Bush's Republican Party, Orrin Hatch, Idaho’s and Utah’s ignorance and intolerance, confederate flag wearing people, homophobia and everything the Republican Party now supports and upholds. I heard Barry Goldwater not just turning over in his grave but signing up as a Democrat in the next election. The most telling feature of it all is that, when you look at buttoned-down Orrin Hatch, he looks like someone's sweet old grandmother. That's how much looks deceive!

Geez! I'll be glad when the Bushman and party are out of power so that I can return to being the mild-mannered Clark Kent I once was. I haven't had even a moment to change and wash my cloak the last 6 years.

AND, NOW, FOR SOME MORE SCIENCE:
"EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: A PRIMER"

All of the following is cut and pasted from a paper by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby which paper you can link to with the following Principle:

Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.

To say that the function of your brain is to generate behavior that is "appropriate" to your environmental circumstances is not saying much, unless you have some definition of what "appropriate" means. What counts as appropriate behavior?

"Appropriate" has different meanings for different organisms. You have sensory receptors that are stimulated by the sight and smell of feces—to put it more bluntly, you can see and smell dung. So can a dung fly. But on detecting the presence of feces in the environment, what counts as appropriate behavior for you differs from what is appropriate for the dung fly. On smelling feces, appropriate behavior for a female dung fly is to move toward the feces, land on them, and lay her eggs. Feces are food for a dung fly larva—therefore, appropriate behavior for a dung fly larva is to eat dung. And, because female dung flies hang out near piles of dung, appropriate behavior for a male dung fly is to buzz around these piles, trying to mate; for a male dung fly, a pile of dung is a pick-up joint.

But for you, feces are a source of contagious diseases. For you, they are not food, they are not a good place to raise your children, and they are not a good place to look for a date. Because a pile of dung is a source of contagious diseases for a human being, appropriate behavior for you is to move away from the source of the smell. Perhaps your facial muscles will form the cross-culturally universal disgust expression as well, in which your nose wrinkles to protect eyes and nose from the volatiles and the tongue protrudes slightly, as it would were you ejecting something from your mouth.

Photo: the back of the Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane from a little ampitheater looking up.

For you, that pile of dung is "disgusting". For a female dung fly, looking for a good neighborhood and a nice house for raising her children, that pile of dung is a beautiful vision—a mansion. (Seeing a pile of dung as a mansion—that's what William James meant by making the natural seem strange).

The point is, environments do not, in and of themselves, specify what counts as "appropriate" behavior. In other words, you can't say "My environment made me do it!" and leave it at that. In principle, a computer or circuit could be designed to link any given stimulus in the environment to any kind of behavior. Which behavior a stimulus gives rise to is a function of the neural circuitry of the organism. This means that if you were a designer of brains, you could have engineered the human brain to respond in any way you wanted, to link any environmental input to any behavior—you could have made a person who licks her chops and sets the table when she smells a nice fresh pile of dung.

But what did the actual designer of the human brain do, and why? Why do we find fruit sweet and dung disgusting? In other words, how did we get the circuits that we have, rather than those that the dung fly has?

When we are talking about a home computer, the answer to this question is simple: its circuits were designed by an engineer, and the engineer designed them one way rather than another so they would solve problems that the engineer wanted them to solve; problems such as adding or subtracting or accessing a particular address in the computer's memory. Your neural circuits were also designed to solve problems. But they were not designed by an engineer. They were designed by the evolutionary process, and natural selection is the only evolutionary force that is capable of creating complexly organized machines.

Natural selection does not work "for the good of the species", as many people think. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is a process in which a phenotypic design feature causes its own spread through a population (which can happen even in cases where this leads to the extinction of the species). In the meantime (to continue our scatological examples) you can think of natural selection as the "eat dung and die" principle. All animals need neural circuits that govern what they eat—knowing what is safe to eat is a problem that all animals must solve. For humans, feces are not safe to eat—they are a source of contagious diseases. Now imagine an ancestral human who had neural circuits that made dung smell sweet—that made him want to dig in whenever he passed a smelly pile of dung. This would increase his probability of contracting a disease. If he got sick as a result, he would be too tired to find much food, too exhausted to go looking for a mate, and he might even die an untimely death. In contrast, a person with different neural circuits—ones that made him avoid feces—would get sick less often. He will therefore have more time to find food and mates and will live a longer life. The first person will eat dung and die; the second will avoid it and live. As a result, the dung-eater will have fewer children than the dung-avoider. Since the neural circuitry of children tends to resemble that of their parents, there will be fewer dung-eaters in the next generation, and more dung-avoiders. As this process continues, generation after generation, the dung-eaters will eventually disappear from the population. Why? They ate dung and died out. The only kind of people left in the population will be those like you and me—ones who are descended from the dung-avoiders. No one will be left who has neural circuits that make dung delicious.

In other words, the reason we have one set of circuits rather than another is that the circuits that we have were better at solving problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history than alternative circuits were. The brain is a naturally constructed computational system whose function is to solve adaptive information-processing problems (such as face recognition, threat interpretation, language acquisition, or navigation). Over evolutionary time, its circuits were cumulatively added because they "reasoned" or "processed information" in a way that enhanced the adaptive regulation of behavior and physiology.

Realizing that the function of the brain is information-processing has allowed cognitive scientists to resolve (at least one version of) the mind/body problem. For cognitive scientists, brain and mind are terms that refer to the same system, which can be described in two complementary ways—either in terms of its physical properties (the brain), or in terms of its information-processing operation (the mind). The physical organization of the brain evolved because that physical organization brought about certain information-processing relationships—ones that were adaptive.

It is important to realize that our circuits weren't designed to solve just any old kind of problem. They were designed to solve adaptive problems. Adaptive problems have two defining characteristics. First, they are ones that cropped up again and again during the evolutionary history of a species. Second, they are problems whose solution affected the reproduction of individual organisms—however indirect the causal chain may be, and however small the effect on number of offspring produced. This is because differential reproduction (and not survival per se) is the engine that drives natural selection. Consider the fate of a circuit that had the effect, on average, of enhancing the reproductive rate of the organisms that sported it, but shortened their average lifespan in so doing (one that causes mothers to risk death to save their children, for example). If this effect persisted over many generations, then its frequency in the population would increase. In contrast, any circuit whose average effect was to decrease the reproductive rate of the organisms that had it would eventually disappear from the population. Most adaptive problems have to do with how an organism makes its living: what it eats, what eats it, who it mates with, who it socializes with, how it communicates, and so on. The only kind of problems that natural selection can design circuits for solving are adaptive problems.

Obviously, we are able to solve problems that no hunter-gatherer ever had to solve—we can learn math, drive cars, use computers. Our ability to solve other kinds of problems is a side-effect or by-product of circuits that were designed to solve adaptive problems. For example, when our ancestors became bipedal—when they started walking on two legs instead of four—they had to develop a very good sense of balance. And we have very intricate mechanisms in our inner ear that allow us to achieve our excellent sense of balance. Now the fact that we can balance well on two legs while moving means that we can do other things besides walk—it means we can skateboard or ride the waves on a surfboard. But our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not tunneling through curls in the primordial soup. The fact that we can surf and skateboard are mere by-products of adaptations designed for balancing while walking on two legs.

RACIAL JUSTICE—THEN AND NOW

The following piece of history by Anita Hill reminds us all of what we were about back in the good old days of 1950 through 1980 until Ronald Reagan took office and Republicans began to reverse the process of empowering the disenfrachised. I don’t know how many of my readers are old enough to recall those days, but these kinds of stories were always on my mind back then. Take careful note of the states where lynchings took place and note which states have switched to the Republican column in national elections. It’s no accident that things have gone the way they have recently. President Johnson predicted it and the Republican Party hastened it by continually playing the race card. To this day, in this current election, they’re still doing it.

Photo: a beautiful fall day outside the
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane.

“The story that stands out the most is the one about how my mother's family came to Oklahoma. It begins in the fall of 1913. Henery and Ida Elliott were living and raising their children on a farm in eastern Arkansas. About that time, as a small boy ‘in shirttails,’ my mother's brother George recalls being "visited" by a white neighbor on horseback. Consistent with the times, the call was work-related, social interaction between the races at that time being virtually unheard-of. Approaching the Elliott home, the neighbor cut a trail through my grandparents' field, leaving to waste all of the cotton in his newly carved path. ‘My wife needs some help with her cleaning and cooking,’ the neighbor said. He ‘asked’ my grandfather if my grandmother was available to work for him. ‘She's pretty busy just taking care of these children,’ my grandfather responded on her behalf. But whatever care Henery Elliott took not to offend, his explanation that my grandmother was far too busy to work outside her home fell on deaf ears, ‘Have you forgotten who you're talking to?’ the rider demanded. Even at the turn of the century, his status as a ‘freeborn white man’ left neither my grandfather, a former slave, not my grandmother, a descendant of slaves, the option to say no. ‘I’ll be around to see you tonight,’ he threatened as he rode away, cutting another path of wasted cotton through my grandfather’s field.

“During the early twentieth century in much of the United States, even a polite, reasoned rejection by a black person of a white person’s request could be viewed as "uppitiness." My grandfather knew through tales passed along from his father and through his own experience in Arkansas that the lessons for "uppitiness" were harsh and arbitrary, ranging from threats to burned crops to lynching. And those lessons were often doled out at the hands of night riders.

“Between 1882 and 1968, Arkansas was the site of 284 reported lynchings. The incidents of lynching in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, states with higher black populations, were fewer than in Arkansas. Higher incidents of lynching occurred only in the states or Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. The grimly illustrative statistics on lynching do not begin to take into account the night rides and other tactics employed by organizations and individuals. A black family's attempts at self-preservation and protection included the telling and retelling of these stories as warnings to young blacks that the informal ‘system of justice’ born of racism was neither just nor systematic. Racial violence and the threat of such were ever present in the collective black psyche of that time.” —Anita Hill, Speaking Truth To Power, p.16-17

A GENE IS NOT SO EASILY DEFINED

I found this quite interesting. It seems that when the father’s and mother’s chromosomes join to make the first cell, the bits and pieces of their chromosomes fit together quite haphazardly as pieces of one “cross-over” to bits of the other.

“A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.” —Richard Dawkins

“Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

“Genes, like diamonds, are forever, but not quite in the same way as diamonds. It is an individual diamond crystal that lasts, as an unaltered pattern of atoms. DNA molecules don't have that kind of permanence. The life of any one physical DNA molecule is quite short—perhaps a matter of months, certainly not more than one lifetime. But a DNA molecule could theoretically live on in the form of copies of itself for a hundred million years. Moreover, just like the ancient replicators in the primeval soup, copies of a particular gene may he distributed all over the world. The difference is that the modern versions are all neatly packaged inside the bodies of survival machines.

“What I am doing is emphasizing the potential near-immortality of a gene, in the form of copies, as its defining property. To define a gene as a single cistron is good for some purposes, but for the purposes of evolutionary theory it needs to be enlarged. The extent of the enlargement is determined by the purpose of the definition. We want to find the practical unit of natural selection. To do this we begin by identifying the properties that a successful unit of natural selection must have. In the terms of the last chapter, these are longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. We then simply define a 'gene' as the largest entity which, at least potentially, has these properties. The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of any duplicate copies. It is not infinitely long-lived.” —Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1989 paperback edition), p. 35.

WORKING FOR INSTITUTIONS

Currently, I’m reading Anita Hill’s book, Speaking Truth To Power. Earlier in life, I didn’t have a high opinion of myself, yet I’ve always imagined that I could have worked wonders had I just

Photo Then Testifying

led my life a little differently. But when I read Hill’s book and see the politics at work in government agency jobs, I can’t imagine how I could learn to be so guarded at all times, cautious and even deceitful, in order to hold a job like that. I’m really pretty naïve when I come to think of it, no matter how skeptical I think myself. Anita Hill lets us in on her thinking, step by step, as her work relationship with Clarence Thomas evolved over the few years she was under his direction, and we see, clearly, every thought that had to go into each decision, and how those thoughts led to her making miscalculations that, later on, discredited her testimony at Thomas’s hearing
for the Supreme Court. I have never blamed Clarence for his misguided passes at his personal assistant, specially when I consider my own mistakes in the past. Plus, he was separated from his wife at the time, lonely and horny. But that he lied—now that makes him unfit for the office he has. Who coached him to lie, what leaches in our government would scheme to put a liar in the very highest court in the land? Can we believe in any decision a liar makes? Not me. I guess I’m still capable of being naïve, eh? And we can see in the present day lying by Republicans that those dishonest elements haven’t been cleaned out of government yet.

I remember that hearing well, watched most of it, and the way that Republican Senators made every question into an accusation. It was one of the nastiest jobs of character assassination I’ve ever witnessed. I think Arlen Specter even admitted being ashamed by his behavior and the behavior of his compatriots. Maybe it wasn't Arlen, but Danforth, who expressed remorse, since Danforth claims to having not been born enough times until he was born a second time. I didn't know he died in the first place!
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Photo Now

EVANGELICALS?
MEN ON A MISSION. . .

Photo: Bush displays symbolic citizen whose rights he has flattened. "Here's your Bill of Rights," he was quoted as saying with his usual schoolboy humor. "Write it on this if you can!"

“My faith frees me,” the President once wrote. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.”

Imagine!? I thought he was elected to represent me, not his idea of god!

Guess which president of the United States wrote that? Jefferson? Lincoln? That’s right—Bush Junior. And actually, the pres. really doesn’t have to worry about the polls. Carl Rove makes sure that Bush’s conscience corresponds to the polling numbers or, at least, makes sure that the Fox in the Bush propoganda Network interprets everything Bush does as in correspondence with fundamentalist dogma. No—Bush doesn’t worry at all. And speaking of another fundamentalist who was certain in his views and in his behavior too:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews [substitute Muslims] for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple [Iraq] the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish [Muslim] poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.” —Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

AND PAT ROBERTSON’S GOT IT RIGHT TOO, FOR A CHANGE..........PARTIALLY

Confronted with the Republican “Foley scandal”, in which yet one more good Christian man turns out to like young boys, Pat Robertson gives the sign of “El Diablo” on his 700 Club money laundering operation on which he is reported to have said, “Well, this man’s gay. He does what gay people do.”

Pat is right when he makes such a claim about in-the-closet, gay Republicans who must hide and be ashamed of their orientation. They’re bound to be conflicted and confused people in that party. But gay Democrats, unashamed and open people, don’t want to mess with children; they want to get married to other consenting, adult partners and lead normal lives like the rest of us citizens do. I think the Foley thing, as expressed by Robertson (unconsciously and blindly, of course), shows clearly the problem that resides in a nation which asks people who are born a certain way to hide who they are and to be ashamed. A nation, or any institution like that, ignorantly and blindly creates Foleys and priestly or ministerial pedophiles.

Photo is of Foley, hoist by his own petard. >>>>>>>>>>

PS: Note how Pat Rubbertongue's eyes are closed when he prays and, in Monday's post, notice how the girls close their eyes. When I was a prayor, it's my closed eyes that began to open my eyes. I realized that I was praying inside my own head to me, that prayer was self-talk. Self talk is a good thing as long as one doesn't convince herself that there's any being out there tuning in to the synapses firing in her head.

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EVANGELICALS DUPED BY
WHITE HOUSE STAFF

One could have expected what is revealed below in Kieth Olbermann’s MSNBC review of Tempting Faith, a book by David Kuo, noted evangelical, active in Bush’s White House Faith Based scam of tax dollars.

Emotional people are easily duped and, if one has been paying attention to that woman-run-amok who runs the Jesus camps for very young children (where they are traumatized and browbeaten until they cry), emotionality is equated in her mind with spirituality. In fact, if one watches any video of large gatherings of Christians in their worship services, with their eyes closed, hands up and tears streaming, he can’t help but think that to those Christians emotionality equals spirituality. Someone should inform them that emotionality has never been equated with spirituality by true masters of religiosity. Well, maybe this time, Christians will learn, maybe they’ll join the rest of us emotional bingers who got our cherries busted in the sixties and seventies. Let’s hope they wise up and bring a little irony into their drab lives.

By: John Amato on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 4:59 PM - PDT

Olbermann’s TV Transcript Follows:

When President Bush touched on Iraq at his news conference this morning, he may have been revealing more than he knew.

[video] BUSH: The stakes couldn't be any higher, as I said earlier, in the world in which we live. There are extreme elements that use religion to achieve objectives.

He was talking about religious extremists in Iraq. But an hour later, Mr. Bush posed with officials from the Southern Baptist Convention.

It is described as the largest, most influential evangelical denomination in a new book by the former number-two man in Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

The book, "Tempting Faith," not out until Monday, but in our third story tonight, a Countdown exclusive we've obtained a copy and it is devastating work.

Author David Kuo's conservative Christian credentials are impeccable; his resume sprinkled with names like Bennett and Ashcroft. Now, as the Foley cover-up has many evangelical Christians wondering whether the G.O.P. is really in sync with their values, "Tempting Faith" provides the answer: No way.

Kuo, citing one example after another of a White House that repeatedly uses evangelical Christians for their votes — while consistently giving them nothing in return;

A White House which routinely speaks of the nation's most famous evangelical leaders behind their backs, with contempt and derision.

Furthermore, Faith-Based Initiatives were not only stiffed on one public promise after another by Mr. Bush — the office itself was eventually forced to answer a higher calling: Electing Republican politicians.

Kuo's bottom line: the Bush White House is playing millions of American Christians for suckers.

According to Kuo, Karl Rove's office referred to evangelical leaders as 'the nuts.'
Kuo says, 'National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy.' "

So how does the Bush White House keep 'the nuts' turning out at the polls?

One way, regular conference calls with groups led by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, and radio hosts like Michael Reagan.

Kuo says, "Participants were asked to talk to their people about whatever issue was pending. Advice was solicited [but] that advice rarely went much further than the conference call. [T]he true purpose of these calls was to keep prominent social conservatives and their groups or audiences happy."

They do get some things from the Bush White House, like the National Day of Prayer, “another one of the eye-rolling Christian events,” Kuo says.

And “passes to be in the crowd greeting the president when he arrived on Air Force One or tickets for a speech he was giving in their hometown. Little trinkets like cufflinks or pens or pads of paper were passed out like business cards. Christian leaders could give them to their congregations or donors or friends to show just how influential they were. Making politically active Christians personally happy meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda.”

When cufflinks weren't enough, the White House played the Jesus card, reminding Christian leaders that, quote, “they knew the president's faith” and begging for patience.
And the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives?

According to Kuo, “White House staff didn't want to have anything to do with the Faith-Based Initiative because they didn't understand it any more than did congressional Republicans . They didn't lie awake at night trying to kill it. They simply didn 't care."
Kuo relates one faith-based promise after another — billions of dollars in funding and tax credits — that goes unfulfilled year after promise after year.

He recounts one specific funding exchange with Mr. Bush:

Bush: "Eight billion in new dollars?"

Kuo: "No sir. Eight billion in existing dollars for which groups will find it technically easier to apply. But faith-based groups have been getting that money for years."
Bush: "Eight billion. That's what we'll tell them. Eight billion in new funds for faith-based groups."

Why bother lying?

Kuo says, "The faith-based initiative had the potential to successfully evangelize more voters than any other."

According to Kuo, the Office spent much of its time on two missions:

One—Trying–and failing–to prove Mr. Bush's claim of regulatory bias against religious charities hiring who they wanted. Quote: "Finding these examples became a huge priority. …[but] religious groups had encountered very few instances of actual problems with their hiring practices." "It really wasn't that bad at all."

Another mission: lobbying the President to make good on his own promises.

How?

Kuo says they tried to prove their political value by turning the once-bipartisan faith-based initiatives into a political operation.

It wasn't just discrimination against non-Christian charities. (One official who rated grant applications told Kuo, " when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero…a lot of us did. ")

The Office was also, literally, a taxpayer-funded part of the Republican campaign machinery.

In 2002, Kuo says the office decided to "hold roundtable events for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders … using the aura of our White House power to get a diverse group of faith and community leaders to a 'nonpartisan' event discussing how best to help poor people in their area."

White House Political Affairs director Ken Mehlman "loved the idea and gave us our marching orders. There were twenty targets." Including Saxby Chambliss in Georgia and John Shimkus in Illinois.

Mehlman devised a cover-up for the operation. He told Kuo, "It can't come from the campaigns. That would make it look too political. It needs to come from the congressional offices. We'll take care of that by having our guys call the office to request the visit."
Kuo explains, "this approach inoculated us against accusations that we were using religion and religious leaders to promote specific candidates."

Those roundtables were a hit. Republicans won 19 of those 20 races. 76 percent of religious conservatives voted for Chambliss over decorated war hero Max Cleland.

And Bush's 2004 victory in Ohio? That "was at least partially tied to the conferences [they] had launched [there] two years before."

By that time, Kuo had left the White House, concluding that "it was mocking the millions of faithful Christians who had put their trust and hope in the President and his administration.

Bush knew his so-called compassion agenda was languishing and had no problem with that."

If you would question Mr. Kuo's credibility, you should know his former boss also quit the White House complaining in his one public interview that politics drove absolutely everything in the Bush administration. There is more, much more revealed in Tempting Faith… how Jack Kemp was tricked into sounding like a religious conservative without even knowing it; Jerry Falwell's astonishing behavior at the 9/11 Day of Remembrance and considerably more as our Countdown exclusive of Tempting Faith continues here tomorrow night.

ANOTHER PHOTO ENTRY

These photos are more from a series I took this summer called "Looking Up In Spokane". I called the series that because I was walking around looking up and shooting these pictures. I did this for several days. But I also have the feeling that downtown Spokane is itself looking up after decades of fading fortunes. Almost 20% of the people of Spokane live in poverty, but let's hope that things are "looking up" for Spokane and those figures will decline.

A tree and a couple of bank buildings.

Some of Spokesman Review building watched over by a creature from Mars.

Crowding the sky.

Same tree and one bank building from another angle with herd of clouds.

Another time, another hat.

CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Some in the cognitive sciences are now suggesting that genetic evolution is no longer the primary force in evolution since the human animal is taking control, for good or ill, of his genetic future. Just think how many are being kept alive who would have died.

They now speak of cultural evolution. Can the way we adapt to our individual cultures create changes in our psychologies that will have survival repercussions? One of the things that struck me recently, thinking about cultural change, is the change I see from ancient Greek culture to primitive Christian culture and, now, to this culture. When I think about ancient Greek culture as revealed in its literature and drama, I imagine I can see entirely different psychologies as compared to now. Their dramas work out primitive sorts of emotions, such as revenge, deep family protective feelings, tribal relations, Dionysian revels, deeply seated taboos and what happens when one does not adhere to the cultural line, the bonding of comrades in arms, a mother love which is almost animal-like in its intensity, the earliest conscious acknowledgment of incest problems, pride in relation to gods. It’s all very rough and unconsciously deep stuff, not finely divided. It’s what you’d expect from people not too far from being animals themselves.

Then come monotheistic religions like Christianity, where, if one really thinks about it, humans begin to have “finer” feelings, feelings more subtle and less primitive. It’s the first really conscious expression of love for one’s fellow man which is not a comrade-in-arms sort of dependent love. But the Old Testament shows that a lot of the primitive psychology was still there, tribal stuff, superstitious madness, fortune telling (i.e. the Prophets). Next we leap 1500 years to the French “troveres”, the medieval singers, in whose songs the more delicate feelings of romantic love emerges—a love whose purpose is not just procreation. And then we come to our time when, if others are like me, we are, if we wish not to be manipulated by popular media, pulling back from the broader, sloppier, oten-manipulated emotions like, for example, patriotism and nationalism. This pulling back from simplistic feeling is for self-preservation. Our feelings are more finely tuned and guarded. We can’t be so easily manipulated. I think of the remaining warrior types who sadly can still be manipulated by politicians to go into unnecessary and stupid battle situations and who die without issue. How good is that for an adaptive survival plan? Or those stupid terrorist lads, out there blowing themselves up without children? A thread that runs all the way through my brief history, seems to me, is men's softening and freeing attitudes toward women in general, women taking their place in political life.

Finally, a historian whose name I've forgotten suggested that history is replete with tales of civilizations who prospered, grew soft, only to be overrun by more barbaric civilizations who were, in turn, civilized and grew soft only to be overrun. . . . I wonder if modern armaments have made that scenario obsolete?

The foregoing were my own rough and broad thoughts, thrown down on paper for your consideration. Still, I think they suggest some possible truths or ways of thinking about our forbearers. If the rest of us can just keep from letting the warriors start an atomic war which kills us all, they’re doing a tremendous job for us, eliminating their more grossly-tuned emotional outbursts that come from violent genes. The outcome has to be a generally less violent society, one in which the survival instinct overcomes the death instinct. Think about that!!!!!!!!!!

BURT LANCASTER AND ASSISTED SUICIDE

Just finished Kate Buford’s bio of Lancaster and got online to buy “Ulzana’s Raid” which Kate says is now a highly-rated film. I’m sure I saw it when I wa'r a younger man. But to buy it, I had to fork out 15 bucks for a very yellowed VHS copy. To get a better DVD version, I was looking at 75 dollars. Some people know the film business pretty well, don’t they? I was really disappointed by the visual quality of the film I got but am not willing to fork over 75 buck for better. I had not realized just how many fine movies he did make, and how many failed because they were too real for their time or too experimental. It’s not what one usually thinks when he thinks of Burt Lancaster. Now I know, and delighted in coming across the parts he played that I remember so well—once my memory was jogged.

That old atheist Burt died on my 57th birthday in 1994. October 20th. He spent the last 4 years of his life in a wheelchair almost unable to communicate with anyone until he died of a massive heart attack while lying in bed beside his wife, Susan Martin Lancaster. I just wonder what this very physical man would have decided? I wonder what he thought during those four years while others wiped his butt and tended to his every need? He was so proud of his physicality.

MOVIES

I just saw The Departed. Movies on my current list to see are The Illusionist, Marie Antoinette, The Good Shepherd, Stranger Than Fiction.

TRUMP REGIS

Donald Trump appeared on Regis's show this morning to pimp his new book, Why We Want You To Be Wealthy. Of course, the book will only add to his millions while most who read it do not have the genetic makeup to be the money making asshole that Trump is. But these two old farts were so pompous, polished, self-congratulatory while discussing their "investments" that their arrogance leaped off the screen at me. Trump and Regis both spoke about the disappearing middle-class and how we're becoming a two class nation. Using this scare tactic, Trump wants to leverage you into buying his book. He has absolutely no concern about how a healthy middle-class is a chief ingredient in the ability to sustain a democracy and, therefore, freedom. What jarred me most, however, was how warmly the audience (which I know is not made up of the wealthy) applauded these two while they discussed the audience's imminent demise and decline. It made me truly think it's time for a revolution. But I'm too old and the odds, (what with the rich controlling the media, the government, the military, the financial sector) of pulling off another revolution are staggering. Another irony is that soldiers from poor and middle-class families are dying in Iraq in order to uphold these two assholes and their wealth even as they casually discuss the impoverishment of the soldiers' families. The ironies stacked up on this one TV show segment pile up to an immense mountain of irony.

MY RECENTLY PUBLISHED LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor,

The late physicist, Richard Feynman said, “The only way to have real success in science. . . is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good about it and what’s bad about it equally. In science you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.”

Science’s greatest contribution to humanity’s search for truth is “open-mindedness”. A scientific mind freely changes when confronted by new evidence, and it can simultaneously hold several theories in mind until the best solution emerges. What other American institution can make that claim—that it unflinchingly, ceaselessly questions every belief it has? Discoveries made by scientific open-mindedness explain why no modern Joshua will ever again claim to stop the sun from crossing the sky (i.e. circling the Earth).

Everything American—from jury duty to election decisions—depends upon “scientific” values of integrity and open-mindedness. That’s why it’s so disturbing that 64% of Spokane’s 10th graders (SR, September 9) failed the scientific standard in Washington’s WASL test, but if that average prevails throughout America, the reason why nearly 70% of Americans (averages vary) believe the Bible is literally true is revealed.

Photo: Weathered tree stump along Hurricane Ridge on the Olympic Peninsula. As I took this, I told myself, "I'll bet this old stump has had its photo taken a zillion times."

MICHAEL J. FOX AND HUMANISM

In a September 2006 issue of Ladies Home Journal (that’s right—LHJ) Fox told an interviewer, “I’m writing a book about optimism. I do believe that there is some kind of truth, some kind of ideal, and that people feel best when operating under a set of ethics, as opposed to morals. People just doing the right thing, treating people the way they’d want to be treated, being honest, being fair, not being deceptive and not taking what’s not theirs. I know I feel best operating that way, and so that’s my faith.”

Now—if that’s not a humanist’s credo as opposed to a Christian credo, I’ve never heard one. Of course, what’s missing in Michael’s credo is a punishing superbeing to make him obey. He seems to think that humans almost naturally feel better when they treat one another better. Imagine that! Humans not born evil! Who would have thought it?
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BUSH, WHO DOESN’T READ,
COULDN’T LEARN THIS HISTORY LESSON


The history lesson which follows, our Precious-dent (if George were a reader) could have learned by reading a cultural history like Life In A Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Geis, pp.209-210. I think it’s interesting that Georgie-boy once used the word “Crusade” to describe his (not my, or America’s) frivolous adventure in Iraq. Read on faire knights and damsels. The parallels are striking. Ah, yes, “to live quietly at home”. . . .

“Two years ago, in 1248, Louis IX, valiant and devout king of France, went on crusade. The king's idealism about the Holy Land was shared by few of his subjects or peers. Some two thousand eight hundred knights and eight thousand foot sergeants were recruited, nearly all on a mercenary basis. Jean de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne, accompanied the king, who was a personal friend, with reluctance. Later he described his departure from home:

“‘I never once let my eyes turn back towards Joinville, for fear my heart might be filled with longing at the thought of my beautiful castle and the two children I had left behind.’ The happiest result of the expedition, in fact, is Joinville's own memoir of it, which adds a leaf to Troyes' [French city] literary laurels. After a rather brilliant beginning, in a successful amphibious assault on Damietta, the expedition bogged down in the swampy upriver country around the fortress city of Mansourah. Famine and scurvy turned the camp into a hospital and charnel house, and the survivors were easily taken prisoner by the Saracens. The queen ransomed the king by trading Damietta, after which Louis ransomed Joinville and the other knights by paying four hundred thousand livres. Originally the sultan demanded five hundred thousand, but when the king unhesitatingly agreed, the equally chivalrous sultan knocked off a hundred thousand livres, commenting, ‘By Allah, this Frank does not haggle!’

“The money was raised on the spot by a bit of pressure on the wealthy Knights Templar, but is now in the process of being paid by the king's subjects, mainly the burghers of his cities, already touched for sizeable aids, and facing still more bills for Louis' new fortifications in Syria. It is hardly surprising that quite a few burghers identify themselves with the wrong side of the debate between Crusaders and non-Crusaders that is a favorite subject of the trouveres [medieval minstrels]. They feel that after all, ‘it is also a good and holy thing to live quietly at home, in friendship with neighbors, taking care of children and goods, going to bed early and sleeping well.’ If the sultan of Egypt should take it into his head to invade France, they will be ready to pay an aid, and take up their pikes and crossbows besides. But they do not see the wisdom of journeying far over the sea to die, and die ex¬pensively at that.”

Notice that the trouveres (i.e. the “medieval minstrels”), the Hollywood types of the Middle Ages, recognized nonsense when they saw their rulers off to foolish adventures. So many parallels to our current situation that one can almost choke on them.


CLICHÉ/STEREOTYPE

Every once in awhile, I get a bug about a word and go look it up. “Cliché” was one such recent word. I thought its origins were so interesting that I’m putting it in here. A Frenchman, named Louis-Etienne Herhan, invented the cliché in 1800. A cliché was a “stereotype plate” used in printing. It was made from special wax molds imprinted by a sheet of type. The “plate could be used for 10,000 copy impressions without resetting or wearing out the printer’s type.” Thus, one can see how sentiments, oft repeated, began to be called clichés.

BUILDING OUR HUMAN CULTURE OUT OF ANIMAL SCRAPS

In his conclusion to Chapter 7, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 219-220, H. Clark Basset discusses how small, incremental changes in the brain, based on adaptations during our evolution from animal to man, still affect the modern human animal. Enjoy! Everything that follows is a long quotation from the chapter.

“Given the importance of predators and prey in human evolution, it is likely that we have only begun to uncover the full array of predator-prey adaptations that the mind contains. Until very recently, attack by formidable alien beasts was a real and constant possibility in everyday life. The word alien means creatures whose bodies and minds were not human, but who were exquisitely adept at finding, stalking, and killing primates who were weak, slow, and perceptually deficient in comparison to many other species. Selection to be aware of these creatures, of their thoughts, plans, and intentions, as well as a strategic intelligence to take advantage of this awareness, would have been strong. Here, we need to think in science fiction terms. Imagine the human mind as an exquisitely designed computer, armed with state-of-the-art sensors, trackers, detectors, and inference engines all engineered for the purpose of predator defense and evasion. What would these look like? Without doubt, the best equipment designed by military science does not even come close. Yet, relatively little attention has been paid to predator detection and evasion as adaptive problems that could shed light on the design of our minds.

(Photo: Shot from a moving car on Route 2, east of the Cascades.
I love this kind of barren landscape, and I don't know why.
Perhaps there's a bit of Gila Monster DNA in my bones.)

“On the other side of the coin, humans are predators by nature. We have been hunters of other animals for millions of years. Far from diminishing with time, selection for the skills necessary to stalk and kill animals has accelerated over the course of human evolution, as hunting has played an ever-increasing role in human subsistence. For those who have never hunted, the difficulty of the task is easy to underestimate. Dawkins (1976) coined the term the life/dinner principle to refer to the asymmetry in fitness payoffs to predators and prey for the two possible outcomes of a predation event: If the predation event is a success, the predator wins dinner, but the prey loses his life; vice versa, if it fails. There is another asymmetry, which might be called the anywhere but here principle: For a predator to succeed, the predator must manage to be in exactly the same place as the prey at exactly the same time; for the prey to succeed, it need only be anywhere else. Obviously, it is much easier to satisfy the latter condition than the former. This means that whereas prey can use all kinds of ‘dumb’ tactics to avoid predation, including hiding, crypsis, and living in holes or trees, predators must be designed to bring about a very unlikely and nonrandom physical state of the world, which prey are expressly designed to avoid. For tool-using predators, there is an added complication: We must either cause our own position to converge with that of the prey or cause the position of a projectile or trap to do so. This poses other adaptive problems such as the perceptual and motor problems involved in successfully aiming a projectile. Our minds are likely to be full of many detection, tracking, and behavior anticipation mechanisms of which we might not be fully aware.

“For psychology, there likely remains much to discover about human predator-prey adaptations. There might be as yet undiscovered mechanisms for detecting predators using motion and other perceptual cues, including perceptual templates for common predators such as big cats; mechanisms for assessing formidability of animals (predators, prey, and even other humans) using cues such as size, muscularity, and so on; early-developing responses to dangerous animals that require little or no learning; aspects of the fear system that have not been discovered using only snakes and spiders as stimuli; undiscovered mood or emotion states specific to stalking or being stalked; and more. The notion of intentional schemas that I have proposed here—specific, prepared, content domains within the domain of intentional reasoning, of which predator-prey would be only one—has scarcely been investigated, but it would be surprising if intentional reasoning were not rich with evolved, content-specific procedures. In addition, we might find predator-prey adaptations operating in unusual contexts, co-opted to deal with problems outside their proper domains, from detecting oncoming objects in traffic to strategic reasoning in games or business. Finally, it is possible that investigating evolutionarily relevant problem domains such as predation, which are rarely considered by most contemporary cognitive and developmental psychologists, could lead to drastic reconsideration of how the domains of thought are organized: Rather than thinking of broad domains such as social cognition and theory of mind, we might realize that the mind is not organized around a few large problems but around many small ones such as agency detection, tracking objects, and inferring intention from motion, which do not map neatly onto the categories of contemporary psychology.”