PLEDGES TO ABSTAIN WORTH THE AIR THEIR SPOKEN INTO

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

BACTERIA ALTERING DNA OF HOST

This stuff gets curiouser and curiouser, doesn't it? Found the following on Wired. What would it mean if bacteria were altering our genetic inheritance or that it did so in the past? One more accidental trigger for change and speciation.

"Wolbachia is a prolific parasite, having carved out a niche for itself in some 70 percent of all invertebrate animals. But it's doing more than living in their cells: it's changing their very DNA in a way that could affect how scientists study genetics and evolution across the animal kingdom."

Read more at Wired.

GOULD'S THE PANDA'S THUMB

The following I got from my reading this morning over at the Border's Books near our new condominium. I walked over because my car is snowed in and I don't have a snow shovel. We left our snow shovel back in Spokane at the house we sold there. The new owner is getting a lot of use out of it, no doubt, but we could use it here, where Vancouver is experiencing near record snowfall. Anyhow, evolution has certainly developed many unique ways to foster reproduction. I found this one in Stephen J. Gould's The Panda's Thumb:

[SNIP]
Consider the curious life of a male mite in the genus Adactylidium, as described by E.A. Albadry and M.S.F. Tawfik in 1966. It emerges from its mother's body and promptly dies within a few hours, having done apparently nothing during its brief life. It attempts, while outside its mother, neither to feed nor to mate. We know about creatures with short adult lives—the mayfly's single day after a much lengthier larval life, for example. But the mayfly mates and insures the continuity of its kind during these few precious hours. The males of Adactylidium seem to do nothing at all except emerge and die.

To solve the mystery, we must study the entire life cycle and look inside the mother's body. The impregnated female of Adactylidium attaches to the egg of a thrips. That single egg provides the only source of nutrition for rearing all her offspring—for she will feed on nothing else before her death. This mite, so far as we know, engages exclusively in sib mating; thus, it should produce a minimal number of males. Moreover, since total reproductive energy is so strongly constrained by the nutritional resources of a single thrips' egg, progeny are strictly limited, and the more females the better. Indeed, Adactylidium matches our prediction by raising a brood of five to eight sisters accompanied by a single male who will serve as both brother and husband to them all. But producing a single male is chancy; if it dies, all sisters will remain virgins and their mother's evolutionary life is over.

If the mite takes a chance on producing but a single male, thus maximizing its potential brood of fertile females, two other adaptations might lessen the risk—providing both protection for the male and guaranteed proximity to his sisters. What better than to rear the brood entirely within a mother's body, feeding both larvae and adults within her, and even allowing copulation to occur inside her protective shell. Indeed, about forty-eight hours after she attaches to the thrips’ egg, six to nine eggs hatch within the body of a female Adactylidium. The larvae feed on their mother’s body, literally devouring her from inside. Two days later, the offspring reach maturity, and the single male copulates with all his sisters. By this time, the mother’s tissues have disintegrated, and her body space is a mass of adult mites, their feces, and their discarded larval and nymphal skeletons. The offspring then cut holes through their mother's body wall and emerge. The females must now find a thrips’ egg and begin the process again, but the males have already fulfilled their evolutionary role before "birth." They emerge, react however a mite does to the glories of the outside world, and promptly die.
[PASTE]

Gould in the brief essay which includes the snippet above is talking about why almost all sexed species produce males and females at about the same 50/50 ration. The Adactylidium mite is the exception that tests the rule.

SOCIALISM FOR CAPITALISTS, CAPITALISM FOR SOCIALISTS WORKERS

According to Steven G. Brant:

“The funny thing is, I've known that a significant portion of the US economy is Socialistic for years. ‘What are you talking about?’, you ask? ‘The Military Industrial Complex,’ I answer.

“You do know that all military weapons are purchased using ‘cost plus’ contracts, in which businesses are guaranteed a profit, don't you? And that literally every weapons system comes in over its original budget... and that those cost overruns are absorbed by the government, not the arms manufacturer? There is no Capitalism in the Military Industrial Complex. It's all Socialism, justified by the concept that these weapons are so important to American security that the companies that manufacture them have to be guaranteed a profit, so they don't accidentally go out of business. (By the way, I worked in contracting years ago at the Army Corps of Engineers. So, I know something about how military contracts work.)

“Now, getting back to the death of Capitalism in America as a whole, don't be so sad. You know the expression: ‘From every emergency, there's a chance for something new to emerge.’? Well, that's where we are.”

Read more of his essay here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant/capitalism-is-dead-now-wh_b_127016.html

THE DRAGONFLY COFFEE HOUSE

After all these years, I'm surprised that I can come into a WiFi coffee house anyplace in the world and make an entry on my blog. I don't why I should still get this jolt of electricity when I experience connectivity, because I first used this four years ago when I took my jaunt around the US just after retirement. I dropped into coffee houses and university libraries all over the States and made entries to AINT NO gOD.

The Dragonfly is a corner espresso joint in Portland, in the Alphabet District here at the corner of 24th & Thurman Street. I just came from a meeting of the HGP (the Humanists of Greater Portland) where Robert Sanford presented a very interesting digital photo show of his Spring trip through the Balkans. Let me assure you it was not your family vacation show. It displayed depth and humor and information.

Robert's presentation made me aware of my issues with identity and self-esteem. Seriously, at age 71, I should be over it, but I'm not. Robert stands over 6 feet tall and is imposing. An ex-cop and English teacher, he made me recall that taller men do better in our culture than shorter men in general. Also, he's urbane and knowledgeable. Many humanists are. If our little group is any measure, humanists are also financially better off in general. I felt my insignificance in the world. I felt a lot like I used to feel back in college when I made myself a general nuisance just to make sure that everyone knew that I was in the room. Displaying my imitation of the mad genius, I made more enemies among the cultured than I did friends. I can see now that humility would have served me better and a redoubled effort to master the subject of Literature. The depth of my personality disorders are now evident to me. Perhaps I've done as well as one can do, given my circumstances—a kid of the working class in a world of intellect. Master of no subject matter, I felt eclipsed by literary scholars and strove to become the master of some type of knowledge, yet detail bores me unless it's part of an interesting slide show like Robert's slide show this Sunday morning at Friendly House. God, those days were painful! I just felt a touch of it this morning and I don't want to return to those states of mind again.

The false front of my alcohol recovery was, I now see, another front. Though my knowledge of the recovery process is pretty detailed and interesting, it is not interesting to the world in general. A man like Sanford is more sought out. And I'm okay with that. I'm not being defensive, though, if my past is any example, I could easily be defensive. A sign of more progress? Yes. Whoopee!

Here, at the Dragonfly, I'm also surrounded by people who have done well in the world or who are trying to achieve in this world. A three story frame condo in this district can go for 500,000 dollars and up. All the women around here are interesting. They dress well and wear tight jeans and nice sweaters and blouses open at the neck. Even their hats are interesting. I don't know how to describe what I'm seeing, but I know I'm seeing wealth and culture displayed, and I still don't have the words to describe it. But I know what I'm seeing. If anything, it's in their faces. They are intelligent faces, whatever that means. Or is the intelligence in the eyes? Or is it the self-consciousness of their demeanor that tells me they've very aware of their surroundings and their place in it? In short, am I looking at people just like me when I entered the world of culture and money? If so, I missed the mark a long time ago and failed miserably to calculate my own worth. I can see where F. Scott Fitzgerald was coming from, can't I? When he said the wealthy were different.

Well, I've displayed myself pretty brazenly in this entry, haven't I?

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION MUST BE FOUNDED IN SCIENCE

"My truths, three in number, are the following: first, humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosopy and religion make little sense without taking into account the first two conceptions." —Edward Wilson

Would that make Wiccan religions a place to start? Their connection to the natural world? One day I sat eavesdropping on a coffee shop meeting of Wiccans as they talked about places in nature where they felt natural highs, where they felt connected to nature. I recall driving up onto Mesa Verde one morning at dawn. It was off season and I was alone, looking out over the landscape in a weak sunlight morning. I felt a high, a natural high. A friend who had been born in that region said that all the people in that region felt those connections.

ANOTHER NATURAL HIGH

So proud of America. Its election of Barack Obama to be its president. Gives me hope that many Americans are truly pragmatic and open. When the chips are down, they vote for a man's intelligence and put aside religious nonsense. I know that he did have to pass a religious test but Americans are looking for practical answers to our financial mess rather than at dogmatic solutions to social problems. Isn't that hopeful?

HELLO OUT THERE! THREE MORE DAYS TO ELECTION!!!!!

My wife and I voted last week so we are at ease and relaxed. Yesterday while Mertie was at work and then at school, I had myself a movie day. I went to see "Religulous" and "W", taking a walk in between the show times.

Bill Maher's show didn't open up any new doors for me, but it was fun. I even laughed aloud a few times. "W" was excellent and followed Stone's usual format, getting into character traits of the famous and infamous men he deals with. I thought Brolin's performance was Oscar caliber.

Rainy in Vancouver. Approaching Winter begins to make the Fall cry. Mertie and I are about two months from being settled in our condo. We'll move on the weekend of December 12-15. Movers will pack our stuff on Thursday, the 11th, and move us on the 12th. We're moving to the opposite end of town, far from where I'm typing this at the Mon Ami. The Uptown District is a lovely part of town in Vancouver. I'll miss being able to drive down here in a few minutes to write and read. I'll also feel much farther from Portland though we'll be able to take I-205 across the rivers. It was a two minute drive to I-5, then 15 minutes into Portland. I'm sure the drive will be longer now. I'm also going to miss the lovely apartment complex we now live in. The new place is secluded and nice but the landscaping and flowering shrubs are fewer, plus our condo is between the two wings of the oval that cuts through our 60 condos.

ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER

Just dropped a buddy off at PDX (Portland's airport). He goes way back to the 60s after my first divorce. First I taught him in high school. Then I left that school, then got divorced, then moved in with Carl and his hippy friends in a walk up apartment on Main Street in Dayton, Ohio. Thus began my long journey to now where I sit in Vancouver Washington in Dolce Gelato, making this entry. Don't know how to talk about the visit. It seems that our relationship has not changed one wit for all the progress as a human being I think I've made. We quarreled and debated and got frustrated with one another, just like in the old days. Carl will, of course, be a big entry in my current book, Boomed Out.

I'LL BE HOME FOR... WHEN?

I've begun working on a book which is taking up lots of writing time. And I've got to keep up with my reading. Wife and I are looking into a condo purchase. My entries here in Blogger may fall off quite dramatically. In fact they've already fallen off dramatically. I'm enjoying writing the book I'm working on. I'm trying to enjoy writing it rather than making it a chore. The book is called tentatively Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations.

IF IT'S THIS COMPLEX WHO CAN DISCOVER THEIR ROBOTIC SELF?

The following means, I think, that specific behaviors are a process rather than a location on the DNA strand.

"Genes alone don’t make the man — after all, humans and chimps share roughly 98 percent of their DNA. But where, when and how much genes are turned on may be essential in setting people apart from other primates.

"A stretch of human DNA inserted into mice embryos revs the activity of genes in the developing thumb, toe, forelimb and hind limb. But the chimp and rhesus macaque version of this same stretch of DNA spurs only faint activity in the developing limbs, reports a new study in the Sept. 5 Science.

"The research supports the notion that changes in the regulation of genes— rather than changes in the genes themselves — were crucial evolutionary steps in the human ability to use fire, invent wheels and ponder existential questions, like what distinguishes people from our primate cousins."

From a ScienceNews web article by Rachel Ehrenberg

THE ANTS AND US

The following paragraphs come from the next to last chapter of Edward Wilson's Naturalist. They detail his thinking as he tried to strengthen the evidence for his idea that human culture is not different than ant or monkey cultures. All cultures are heavily indebted to instinctual behavior for their structure and ants and humans share some of these cultural traits in common. It's some more of the science that makes me say that I'm a robot. His idea was attacked mightily when it appeared. Of course, you can see that he's not as much a reductionist as I am when I tell people I'm a robot.

[SNIP]
By this time it was obvious to me that human sociobiology would remain in trouble, both intellectually and politically, until it incorporated culture into its analyses. Otherwise the critics could always cogently argue that since semantically based mind and culture are the defining traits of the human species, explanations of human social behavior without them are useless. This shortcoming was on my mind when Charles Lumsden, a young theoretical physicist from the University of Toronto, arrived in early 1979 to work with me as a postdoctoral research fellow. His interests had lately turned to biology, and he saw great opportunity in the analysis of social behavior. We talked at first about a collaboration on social insects, but soon our conversations gravitated to the subject of heredity and culture. I said, the possible payoff justifies the high risk of failure; let's give it a try. So two or three times a week for eighteen months we sat together and framed the subject piece by piece.

We reasoned as follows. Everyone knows that human social behavior is transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. The brain in turn is a highly structured organ and a product of genetic evolution. It possesses a host of biases programmed through sensory reception and the propensity to learn certain things and not others. These biases guide culture to a still unknown degree. In the reverse direction, the generic evolution of the most distinctive properties of the brain occurred in an environment dominated by culture. Changes in culture therefore must have affected those properties. So the problem can be more clearly cast in these terms: how have genetic evolution and cultural evolution interacted to create the development of the human mind?

No doubt we went out of our depth in embarking upon this subject. But so was everyone else, and no one can be sure of anything until the attempt is made. Undaunted then, we sifted through a small mountain of literature in cognitive psychology, ethnography, and brain science. We built models in population genetics that incorporated culture as units of learned information. We studied the properties of semantic thought to make our premises as consistent as possible with current linguistic theory.

We were looking for the basic process that directed the evolution of the human mind. We concluded that it is a particular form of interaction between genes and culture. This "gene-culture coevolution." as we called it, is an eternal circle of change in heredity and culture. Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgments, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from among those available. We called these competing behaviors and mental abstractions "culturgens." They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as "memes."

Each time an individual modifies his memories or makes decisions, he entrains intricate sequences of physiological events that run first from the perception of visual images, sounds, and other stimuli, then to the storage and recall of information from long-term memory, and finally to the emotional assessment of perceived objects and ideas. Not all culturgens are treated equally; cognition has not evolved as a wholly neutral filter. The mind incorporates and uses some far more readily than others. Examples of heredity-bound culture that Lumsden and I found from the research literature include the peculiarities of color vision, phoneme formation, odor perception, preferred visual designs, and facial expressions used to denote emotions. All are diagnostic of the human species, all part of what must reasonably be called human nature.

Such physiologically based preferences, called "epigenetic rules," channel cultural transmission in one direction instead of another. By this means they influence the outcome of cultural evolution. It is here, through the physical events of cognition, that the genes act to shape mental development and culture.

The full cycle of gene-culture coevolution as we conceived it is the following. Some choices confer greater survival and reproductive rates. As a consequence, certain epigenetic rules, those that predispose the mind toward the selection of successful culturgens, are favored during the course of genetic evolution. Over many generations, the human population as a whole has moved toward one particular "human nature" out of a vast number of natures possible. It has fashioned certain patterns of cultural diversity from an even greater number of patterns possible.
[PASTE]

SCIENCE’S HUMANISTIC STANDARDS

In the book, Naturalist, by Edward O. Wilson, Wilson describes a colleague’s—Bert Hölldobler—standards for honesty and, in those standards, anyone can see that humanistic science offers standards every bit as rigorous as any moral code based on what kings hand down to their subjects as do religious standards.

“He was a scientist's scientist. He simply loved science as a way of knowing. I believe he would have practiced it without an audience or financial reward. He played no political games. If new data did not fit, he quickly shifted to a new position. He was one of the few scientists I have known actually willing to abandon a hypothesis. He was meticulous about crediting others, quick to praise research when it was original and solid, harsh in his rejection when it was slovenly. The tone of his conversation was explicitly and uncompromisingly ethical, a posture born neither of arrogance nor of self-regard, but from the conviction of his humanistic philosophy that without self-imposed high standards, life loses its meaning.” (p. 303)

AUTUMN???????

Strange morning. Cool but will be 80º by afternoon. And I imagined as I drove to Java House that fall had already arrived. The sun seemed bleached out and weak, hazy. Fall's certainly near but not here yet... I hope. Current bathroom reading is Art: a world history. I'll be reading it for a year or more I guess. 

Edward Wilson's father was an alcoholic suicide. Wilson, of course, is the author of Naturalist, my current reading. He built up the concept of sociobiology. Wilson's father gave Edward a simple Southern code for life. Of course, these codes are more often honored in their breech rather than in the practice. "Never lie, he told me, never break your word, be always respectful of others and protective of women, and never back down if honor is at stake."

These codes are the reason the South is so full of guilt and shame because no one can live up to such codes imposed from the outside. This code was responsible for Wilson Senior's death if you ask me. Of course, they set the simple, honest man up for the duplicitous man who flaunts the codes in order to get ahead. In Southern churches, the rich leaders of the church team up with the parsons and preachers to dupe the Southern working man. That's why poor Southern men so crazily vote for neocon rich men who will not have a working man's best interests at heart. Until the average Southerner wises up, America will continue to fall behind the rest of the civilized world. You only have to listen to a Republican for a minute and you realize that nothing they believe in will help a struggling family get ahead. 

Also, this code of honor is one of the chief reasons that there is so much gun violence in the South. I can no longer recall the book a couple of Southern psychologists wrote in which they identified these codes of honor as being the reason Southern men shoot each other so often. Of course, Southerners do have the highest rates of suicide, poverty and homicide in the country.

THE ROBOTIC HUMAN THINKING MACHINE

I get a kick out of calling myself a robot in various social situations. Some think I’m joking. Others might be offended, and, as for myself, I don’t know how serious I am, but the evidence continues to mount up that this wonderful reasoning process we humans pride ourselves on is nothing more than an adaptation, an instinct for thinking. Well, if thought is instinctive, how much credit can we take for employing it consciously? If we are not really consciously applying logic and reason, then what does it mean to think? The following is an brief bit of a paper by two evolutionary psychologists which seems to indicate that thinking is instinctive rather than consciously employed. If you can, you should try to get ahold of the entire paper, if not the book in which it appears.

“Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.

“In short, the neurocognitive system that causes reasoning about social exchange shows evidence of being what Pinker (1994) has called a cognitive instinct: It is complexly organized for solving a well-defined adaptive problem our ancestors faced in the past, it reliably develops in all normal humans, it develops without any conscious effort and in the absence of explicit instruction, it is applied without any conscious awareness of its underlying logic, and it is functionally and neurally distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange,” Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (p. 585)

LIES MY TEACHERS TOLD ME

The following sentiment made me recall that book, Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, I mentioned several months back. In summary he pointed out that people with educations have not become liberalized (unlike me). Instead, they become more conservative. So why should Chinese citizens be any different? The passage is from Newsweek (Aug.18-Aug.25), p.31.

“Such sentiments are common on the mainland. But people like Zhang were supposed to be different: he's what Chinese call a hai gui—"sea turtle"—referring to someone who has lived overseas. (The phrase is a pun on haiwai guilai, meaning "returned from overseas.") Their numbers are growing by the tens of thousands every year, and as the sons and daughters of the elite, they have an outsize influence once they move back to China. In the West there's long been an assumption that this cohort would import Western values along with their iPods. They were envisioned as the bridge to a more open, liberal, Western-friendly China.”

ME AND WOODY, ATHEISTS, BUT I’M NOT DEPRESSED

The following passages are lifted from a Newsweek article occasioned by the release of Woody's new film, “Vicky Christian Barcelona”. I recommend it as one of his best. But what do I know? Anyhow, the themes of his life occur even in interviews. But do we really know since all we have is what the interviewer passes on to us?

[SNIP]
Allen says the indifference of the universe has obsessed him since he was a child. "My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old, and then I turned gloomy."

He can only attribute that shift to an awareness of death, which he claims to remember from the crib. "Now, maybe I stayed in the crib longer than other kids," he adds, with the well-timed cough of a former stand-up comedian. And there it is, that little spark of wryness, suggesting that the nihilism is just shtik. But it soon becomes apparent that when he says he agrees with Sophocles suggestion that to have never been born may be the greatest boon, he means it.

At 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void. He cannot reconcile his strident atheism with his superstition about the banana [superstitious Woody must always cut his morning banana into 7 pieces], but he knows why he makes movies: not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. Movies are a great diversion, he says, "because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine."

"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker."

As a filmmaker, he knows that audiences need a respite from the darkness of his vision—he wanted to end "Hannah and Her Sisters" with his character alone, having been dumped by Hannah's sister, but thought viewers wouldn't go for such a bleak conclusion. In real life, however, he believes there are no happy endings. "It's like the beginning of 'Stardust Memories.' The trains all go to the same place," he says. (And no, that place is not "jazz heaven," as a character in that film hopes.) "They all go to the dump."
[PASTE]

SCIENCE DECAYS IN US

I was reading through an article at ScienceNews.org about possible changes to our standard model of particle physics created by some not too recent observations “at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., from 1989 to 2002” when I came upon the following:

[SNIP]
Studies of the decay of kaons hint at possible flaws in standard model of particle physics.

Physicists had hoped to gather five times as much data, but budget cuts led the Department of Energy to abruptly end the Brookhaven experiment in 2002, Littenberg says. However, if the trend of finding a higher decay rate in this rare mode continues with other experiments expected to start at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in Tokai-mura — researchers are shipping their Brookhaven kaon detector there — as well as at CERN in Geneva, the standard model could be in for a revision.

By Ron Cowen for web edition : Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 (SN: 7/19/08, p.16).
[PASTE]

The experiment in question is not the important thing I want to call attention to here in my blog. Note the time frame of the experiments and who came into office when! What?! Budget cuts in the science programs of America? Who would have thought that such a thing would happen here? And look how we’re shipping our stuff to other countries so that these experiments can continue. Another major loss in prestige for America. And who caused it? The answer is obvious and self-explanatory.

Frankly, we can be happy that scientists believe in sharing resources and findings, though that is not always the case. I’m currently reading Naturalist by Edward Wilson and the departmental politics he describes does show that some members of the scientific community do have agendas based on personal pride. Which is natural, so why are we shipping our experiments to other countries?

MONDAY MORNING AT THE MON AMI

Service on the internet is pretty slow this morning. 

Such weather—three straight days of hundred degree temps and, then, a 90 and, now it's 72 degrees, overcast with a nice drizzle to make things wonderful. Saturday, Mertie and I went to see Woody Allen's latest flick, "Vicky Christina Barcelona". Bardem is in it and he's really something (going from psychopathic killer in "No Country For Old Men" to intense Latin lover) as well as Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johannson. A marvelously complicated love triangle repeated in several combinations of three. Like shooting craps with five dice, three dice. Mertie and I loved it. 

It's strange having this WiFi loaded computer with me this morning. I feel different. The pattern of reading and noting things down in my handwritten journal is all smashed to smithereens. And I notice how much I've changed when I try to write something creatively, like the review above. All the emotional tangles that used to inform and connect my words have disappeared. I'm completely well as far as my past darknesses are concerned. My mental kinks are ironed out and so, also, is my writing. When I was young, I was so filled with emotions that my mind couldn't sit still. When I wrote something, my mind grabbed ideas and images from everywhere at once. Not that this was particularly successful, but it was the way my brain worked. Now it's so different. I hardly feel connected to what I put down on this computer. Most of the time, I'm at peace and not driven by emotions to odd behaviors. This is either the aging process or it's the work I did all those years with John paying off. Or, it's having this computer which completely changes the initial impulse to write, distances it from the connection my hand/eye used to have when a pencil or pen is involved. 

I don't know what to feel about the current mental situation. I'm so at peace. Last week I told my doctor, Sugarman, that I've never felt so healthy, mentally—and physically for the most part—that I think about death all the time, I mean, in the sense that I don't want my life, as it is now, to end. I recall the days when I thought I'd be dead by thirty years of age. Then, that turned into the time I crashed my car on purpose at around age 31 or 32 and tried to end my life in sort of a accidental way. Never mind the details, but I didn't send my car head on into a bridge abuttment or anything like that. I wouldn't be here. It was more of going around a curve too fast so that I rolled and crashed. Now, here I am today, sort of untroubled by deeply painful confusion and fears and feeling a little detached and not certain I like it. 

Scarlett Johansson plays a women who doesn't know what she wants but who does know what she doesn't want. My words exactly when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I'm sure I even said those exact words or some words very close to them. I must admit, though, to wondering just who I am these days. I'm not driven by anything. And when my emotions aren't telling me what to do, I don't always know what I am supposed to do. 

AT THE MOVIES

Before I run on I need to exclaim some disgust with fellow movie goers' tastes in commercials. And stop there. The current onscreen ad about lollipops being used to tear off a man's body hair is stolen from "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and the ladies behind me still thought it was funny, chortling away. Also the vomiting baby stock broker disgusts me, but psychology has taught ad men that a baby's face draws attention like a pile of money. People who don't know this are, to me, suckers. Which brings me to an old thought of mine about how sad it is that in order not to be manipulated by the advertising of psychological con men and hucksters, we have to turn off so many psychological entrance points that influence other people that we are not able to interact with people who don't know when they're being manipulated and, frankly, probably don't even care about it like I do. 

IRONIC WILSON UNAWARES

Naturalist Edward Wilson was ironic in a statement he made in his memoir, Naturalist (pp. 168-69): “Much of the Pacific fauna has gone under in the path of pigs, goats, rats, Argentine ants, beard grass, and other highly competitive forms introduced by human commerce. Strangers have savaged the islands of the world.”

I’m sure Wilson would agree with what I’m about to say, but at the moment he wrote the previous sentences, he forgot what he now knows only too well. All one needs add to what Wilson wrote is the thought that the human animal is the most competitive stranger who has most “savaged” not only islands of the globe but the globe itself—water, earth and air. So these other competitive strangers are no worse and no better than humankind itself. Isn’t that ironic in the deepest sense—we and the other competitive species dominating the globe?

NAV. SEC. BLUNDERS ON OBAMA

"... the feeling that there is a common humanity" even with adversaries "is deep in his own personal experience and his DNA," say Naval secretary Richard Danzig, speaking about Obama in a long past Newsweek I happened upon in my doctor's office today.

Okay! In his DNA? Who made this guy a Naval secretary? What kind of brain numbness does his statement show us? By what evidence can he claim to know Obama's DNA?

Besides the stupidity of such a statement at the surface level is the truth of what underlies it far beyond what a Naval officer actually knows. The truth is, and a very important truth is is, there is a "common humanity" in all of us just by the definition of "humanity". We all share it in common and to the same degree and depth. It is exactly that "shared humanity" that ought to show us humans the way to a world peace that is lasting and satisfying.

It's only when we see someone as an enemy that we forget the common humanity they share with us and begin to dehumanize them. That navy guy is ignorant as cow manure. He does not even realize the important truth that underlies his superficial analysis of Obama's character.

What we need is a world full of people who understand that we all share a common humanity and that if we were them (the other), then we'd see that they are doing just as we'd be doing if we were in their shoes and trying to deal with America's aggressive stance toward the world under neocon leadership. If that navy dupe would only use his own "common humanity" to interpret and understand his enemy's behavior, we'd soon see an end to violence in the world. He's got it all right at his fingertips, but he can't see it because of neocon blinders.

NEOCON GANGBANGERS

It occurred to me this morning as I noodled around in the shower, alternating between bursts of song and thought, that neocons and gangbangers have approximately the same idea about how to "win ? and influence people". If Americans elect Barack Obama as president of these United States, we will gain tremendous respect around the world. Our melting pot promise will once again be fulfilled, but neocons have a different idea about how to influence the world. They want the world to fear America. It's in that wish that one can see the gangbanger influence in neocon thought. Gangbangers talk about "respect" all the time, but as far as I can tell, they mean "fear" when they say respect because it usually accrues to the banger with the biggest gun. It's a typical confusion for emotionally immature children to confuse fear and respect. Nazis and Fascists also confuse those terms. Now... I'm not saying that neocons are fascists. It's just that they think like fascists. Now that wouldn't make them fascists, would it?

HELLO OUT THERE!

I’m at the Mon Ami and making this entry from here. This is my first ever internet connection by means of WiFi. Ain’t it exciting? And it caused me a lot of trouble to do it. Every time I tried to copy and paste, my connection was killed and the text appeared outside the text box. What's up with that?

We’re expecting very unseasonable weather in the Portland/Vancouver area. 100 degrees. So I took an early walk down by the Columbia River and was full of depression about America, about the failing quality of its products (built in foreign lands) and its customer service work as exemplified by phone representatives from foreign countries. I recall the days when American products led the world in their quality and when American industry and retailers stood behind their products.

I was so depressed by my contact with phone representatives that I called American corporate headquarters of Hewlett-Packard and Sear’s and spoke to consumer relations representatives. The Sears lady listened and responded well, but the Hewlett-Packard woman (both women?) told me that we are living in a new world and that it will never be the same.

I know... I’m antiquated. An old fart. Obsolete. But... damn it? Where’s America gone to? And so quickly! It did not help to sit down, here at the Mon Ami, to read that by 2050 us Caucasions will be less than half of the American population. Look, I’m not prejudiced but only worried that the high number of children many of these Latins have will sink America even deeper into poverty. Many immigrated from countries where population increases are the primary reason for their poverty. So they come here, having learned nothing, and create the same conditions in America that they suffered from in their countries of origin. For goodness sakes, folks, learn something! Open your eyes and close your zippers. Or at least use contraceptives. Does anyone else get the connection between countries of origin, large families and religious affiliations?

I’m not proud of that last entry. Let me assure you that I’m not so fiercely antagonistic as all that, and I welcome newcomers as being the bravest of their country’s citizens, willing to go to a new country to further their lives. That means that they have much to offer us. But may I also remind them to keep in mind the poverty of where they came from and its causes, and to alter their past beliefs just a little so as to not recreate those conditions here.

What follows is some stuff I wrote in my new word processing program yesterday to enter when this Mon Ami internet connection was created for the first time:

This entry will be, when I get around to it, my first blog entry begun on my new MacBook, using its new software called iWork. I will probably wait until my next visit to Mon Ami, the espresso joint down on Main Street, to make this entry at Blogspot using, this Macbook’s WiFi capacity. This also marks a changing method for the peripatetic journaling I’ve been doing since around 1966. Soon I will discontinue my handwritten journal and this Internet and Computer journal will become my only entries.

Will I put down some boring thoughts in an online journal like I do in my penned journal? I’m not sure. Who could be interested in the daily wanderings and wonderings of an old man nearly ready to enter into the age of 71? I’m at an awkward age, still imaging that I’ll write some large work of literature that will see publication while, on the other hand, my fearful mind tells me that all the effort will prove fruitless so why try. Also there’s another voice in my head that wants me to slow down, take it easy, read and write at liesure, be a real retired person after all with nothing more to do than cook meals for my wife who is still in the work force making her living and her way in the career world she’s chosen. It’s she who encourages me to try once more to write a publishable longer work, reminding me that I enjoy the process of writing, that I have always been writing something, whether a haiku, a letter to an editor, a letter to a friend, a short story.... Yes, I write something almost every day so why not just keep at it out of force of habit? Damn the publication torpedo; full speed ahead.

DOWN AND DOWN WE GO, ROUND AND ROUND WE GO...

Headlines on “Money & Investing” section of Wall Street Journal (8/13/08) read “Skies Darken For Retailing As Spree Fades” and “Bank Selloff Halts Rally As Dow Falls 139.88 Points”. Yep... and it’s going to get hot in Vancouver, next three days with temps nearing 100. Us old folks are supposed to get out of that sort of temps pretty quick!

POISONOUS

“In the natural world, beautiful usually means deadly. Beautiful plus casual demeanor always means deadly.” —Edward Wilson, p.150, Naturalist

Does Edward realize the implications of his words when we also add that humankind is also part of the natural world?

I’M SORRY TO SAY: REPUBLICAN (CONSERVATIVE-CHRISTIAN-FUNDAMENTALIST-MCCAIN) PARTY IS FASCIST IN NATURE TOP TO BOTTOM! WHY DOES MCCAIN CONTINUE TO BE A REPUBLICAN?

The evidence of vote tampering by Republicans continues to mount. The evidence pile is now about as tall as Mount Hood in the State of Oregon.

[SNIPPET]
Von Spakovsky, Schlozman's deputy, who has been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury because of his refusal to speak to investigators, was also alleged to have to misused his official position by setting aside the law to take actions to help Republican candidates.

When von Spakovsky was nominated to serve on the Federal Election commission, six career officials of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, who had worked under him, wrote the Senate asking that he not be confirmed.

The six alleged that "during the 2004 election cycle" von Spakovsky "broke with established Department policy by getting involved with contentious and partisan litigation on the eve of the election. Mr. von Spakovsky drafted legal briefs between the Republican and Democratic parties in three battleground states, Ohio, Michigan and Florida just before the election, all in favor of the Republican party's position." The six career officials further asserted: "These briefs ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it would be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute."

These briefs ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it could be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute.
[PASTEIT]

As reported by Murray Waas murraywaas@gmail.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

I’MADUMMYI'MALSOSTUPIDANDIJUSTDON'TUNDERSTANDIT!!!!

I’m a dummy. I’m an ignoramus. I’m a dummy. Sunday at the humanist meeting, I was approached and castigated by an intense fellow humanist for my ignorance. My natural mind, it seems, is incapable of understanding statistical truths. I’m barely able to talk about it, I know so little about it.

How many times have I now disparaged the Monty Hall paradox? Several times now, I’ve claimed that it is not true that if you switch doors after Monty hypothetically opens one of the goat doors behind which two goats and one Rolls Royce wait, your chances of winning the Rolls will increase to two thirds as opposed to one-third if you stick with your first choice. I’m wrong. It’s beyond me. I know… I can barely make a straight statement about the situation. You must read it for yourselves. I’m linking you to a representation of the game show that demonstrated to me how wrong I am.

But let me be the first to state how wrong I am. Once I start to think about it, I do sort of understand the situation, but the mathematics of it does escape me. But I had to stop and think about the fact that Monty never shows me the door I have chosen first. He puts that aside and shows me whats behind another door, and in that failure to let me see my first choice all hell breaks loose in my blinkered intuitional brain. Perhaps I'm meant to be a believer.

CHECK THIS OUT

[cut]
I watch McCain throughout the sermon. When the story is over, he flashes his creepy Count Chocula smile — the same one he pulls out, teeth bared, after his That's not change we can believe in! stump line — but otherwise doesn't react. Everybody on our side of the chapel is glancing over at him.

In a way, this scene says everything you need to know about McCain's dilemma. The man is a relic from a previous era of conservatism, when privacy was sacrosanct and public expressions of religiosity were considered vulgar and in bad taste. McCain comes from a generation of American men for whom religion was a ticket you punched once a week, a low-effort symbol of conformity to go with your two-car garage, your sorority-girl wife and your weekly golf game with the fellas. The whole braying-to-the-moon, born-again Promise Keeper act perfected by the Bushes and Huckabees of the world is as alien to his sensibility as an Iron John man-poetry retreat. Sitting here in the North Phoenix Baptist pews, he has a look on his face like he'd just as well suck a cock as do an altar call. It's one of his most likable qualities.
[paste]

Matt Taibbi really gets into John McCain, but the subtext is a good trashing of Fundamental Xtians and their hold on political power which seems to be slipping. In a way, Taibbi’s essay, in a twist, could be said to backhandedly support poor old John’s attitudes about religion. According to Taibbi, McCain really doesn’t like them, but he’s got to court them, yet he isn’t able to court them. It turns his stomach. Read it for yourself at

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/21896154/without_a_prayer

LBJ'S CLAIM FURTHER VALIDATED

More than once on this blog, I've mentioned LBJ's claim, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, that the Democratic Party would lose the South for a generation. Over and over again, I've mentioned that racist beliefs underly every Republican Party tactic. Though they surely do believe in this or that economic, international and national policy, still, whatever its claims about those policies, the Republican Party's hidden strength, its appeal and staple product, is racism just as racism once was the Democratic Party's staple and underlying appeal to the Southland.

America will never be able to hold up its head in international company until both the Republican and the Democratic parties renounce any interest in the South and turn it over to some latter day States Rights Party or George Wallace for president bunch. We are shamed by every appeal we make to Southern interests in our politics. Granted, racism is not solely located in the Southland, but its strongest roots are there. And FoxNews, I'll bet, if we could just measure its appeal, will show its strongest base to be in those nether regions of America.

So I'm enjoying, and hope you are too, NAS's (hip hop gangsta rappa) presentation of signed petitions about racism at the doors of FOX headquarters in New York. I signed that petition myself on the internet and so my name is on one of those petitions which Fox refuses to accept. Until they do, we'll know that the FoxRepublicanRacistNews face is forever, now, painted clearly on its red state face, its racism clearly for all to see.

S.J. GOULD'S THE MAN

In my final days as a working man at Mackay Manufacturing, I'd often listen to audio tapes as my machine whirred and wailed its way through stainless, aluminum and steel or plastic blocks of material, turning rectangular slugs into this or that fascinating part for one kind of machine or another. Ah, yes, the job shop!

One man's tapes particularly interested me, and he was Stephen J. Gould. The way he could work through an intellectual problem, exposing it in finest detail, laying bare the incongruities and inconsistencies of human reason intrigued me to no end. Now, retired on my veranda, I'm reading a couple of his books that I once listened to, and I find myself—this is true—near tears at the beauty of the workings of his mind. I'm often moved by displays of human imagination and reason when they clearly transcend the average. Currently, I'm reading The Mismeasure of Man in which Gould lays bare the falsehood of trying to measure intelligence as if it were a single unitary thing that can be measured and used to classify people. I know... I've probably said that more than once in the last couple of days.

Anyhow, today, I came across his analysis of statistical correlations and their relationship to cause (which is practically nil). Read this paragraph. Better yet, buy and read the whole book.

"The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Much of the fascination of statistics lies embedded in our gut feeling—and never trust a gut feeling—that abstract tables summarizing large tables of data must express something more real and fundamental than the data themselves. (Much professional training in statistics involves a conscious effort to counteract this gut feeling.) The technique of correlation has been particularly subject to such misuse because it seems to provide a path for inferences about causality (and indeed it does, sometimes—but only sometimes)." —Gould

Then Gould goes on to dissect this problem of cause and correlation in his usual clear and incisive manner. The statement above makes me think of the Monty Hall problem. I'm not going to state it here. Just Google "Monty Hall Problem", and I'm sure you'll find it. I can think of no clearly case by which one can experience the very real disconnect between numbers (math) and nature than in that problem. A very real percentage is generated in that Hall problem, but when one takes it out into the wild and sets the problem up as a hunting problem (anyone can do it), he will discover that the math lies or, at least, suggests something that is not true.

The math is valid but not true—I think that's the way to describe the conclusion. When I think of this Monty Hall problem and about the simplest math functions in our brains that evolved out of our hunter/gatherer need to find where the game might, on average, be or where we would be most likely to find a certain plant during a specific season (a law of averages at work in the real world) I am enlightened considerably about the evolution of the brain and its adaptations for survival. In short, the brain works one way and mathematics works another. It's a toss up as to whether or not mathematics opens doors into a new reality for future humankind or leads us up blind alleys to dimensions that really don't exist.

Also, I'm aware that I'm really "out there" pretending to understand stuff I may not understand at all, but at least I'm trying to get my Neanderthal brain to grasp the stuff of mathematics.

LIFE IS A BUMPY STINKER

Sometimes Christian bumper stickers let us know more than they want us to know.

Today I was following a van with a bumper sticker that read "Fear" and "Not" separated by a simple line-drawing crucifix. I began to contemplate the occasion of this admonition. To whom were they appealing with their fear/not message? Certainly not to me or mine. My fears are mostly necessary and reasonable, like the fear of stepping in front of a moving vehicle or jumping off a thousand foot cliff without a parachute on. Also a more distant yet healthy fear of religions that might want to turn my America into a theocracy ruled by one or other dominant religion. No, they certainly weren't appealing to me with that admonition.

Then I realized she was signaling to other Christians with her message. And I felt pretty certain she wasn't talking about the fear of jumping in front of moving cars or off high cliffs. No, she was telling her Christians friends not to be afraid of something else. What was it? What is so big a fear that she had to constantly assure other Christians not to be afraid?

I continued contemplating and, then, it came to me, and, simultaneously, I realized why we all must feel sad for the average Christian life. She was telling her friends not to fear life, the fear that lives at the center of their lives. They live in fear, I realized. What kind of fears so haunt them that they must go around telling one another, "Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid." Like children whistling past the graveyard? What is so scary about the Christian inner view of the life we all share that they sound so miserable with their bumper stickers while the rest of us see a normal, sometimes happy, sometimes painful and always funny reality?

Soon I had a host of things that obviously make their lives miserable to them so that they often wish for death or say things like, "If I didn't have god I wouldn't want to be alive." Or "Without god I'd go crazy, run mad and kill and rob and rape." They certainly do fear life. Their god must not be any real comfort to them if they feel those things I've heard them express. Here's this all powerful friendly loving god who lets their lives fill up with fear. Or gives them a brain so full of awful things that they're afraid to live in it. Go figure.

Anyhow, I believe they fear things like god catching them sinning and going to hell for it. They fear their fellow churchgoers might discover at any moment they are as phony and fraudulent as most people in all faiths are much of the time. They must think they are surrounded by evil demons everywhere just waiting to snatch their frequent flier miles to heaven away from them. They must feel personally responsible for all the suffering they see in others all around them. They must feel driven to convert as many people in the world to their way of thinking so that they won't feel so all alone. Yet in America, surrounded by so many like themselves, they don't feel safe. The bumper sticker itself testifies to that. Why would they feel any safer if all of Africa went Christian? Would anything really change inside their heads or out in the world since the world out there is only their projection of the world inside themselves? The world is only as bad or as unbearable as it feels like it is inside their heads. How they feel has nothing to do with the way the world is. The Cosmos just is and it will keep being as it is until the cows come home, or at least until the sun engulfs our planet in a fiery embrace.

Let me tell you—I'm not up on a soapbox, mouthing platitudes here. I'm just as flawed as your average Christian. I've learned what I've just said from personal experience. I've see my own view of the world flipflop in a second's time from happy to fearful. So I don't go around with bumper stickers telling everyone to become an atheist and they'll stop having the occasional fear. No, there is no magic wand for happiness. All I can say is that life is a mixed bag and there's no escape from the terrors, even if you believe that Santa Claus is up there in heaven, waiting with golden wings to attach to your shoulder blades. Because if you can't actually see Santa up there (or the Spaghetti Monster) with the actual wings with your name tag on them, then, no matter how hard you deny it, you'll still have doubts and fall into fear and put little bumper stickers on your bumpers in an attempt to make yourselves feel better.

Hey, that was longer than I meant it to be. When I go riffing, I tend to riff it up.

IT'S BEEN AWHILE

Well, what a day! Today I've been reading my friend's poetry in his latest book, Crazy Stairs. And dipping further into Foreign Affairs magazine for July/August while alternately journaling in my paper journal bits of poetry influenced by Geoff Peterson's work and odds and ends of political and cultural thought entering and exiting my 70 year old leaking brain as fast as they can. There's also more to enter from the Gould book I'm reading, The Mismeasure of Man. I finished Brautigan's book, The Revenge of the Lawn (my bathroom reading these past weeks) and am really disappointed by it. Poor dead suicide. My new bathroom reading will be Art For Beginners by Dani Cavallaro. Well... take a breath... I won't get that all in today, and who'd read it if I did?

BARACK OBAMASERVATION

Barack Obama is a man of the 21st Century. John McCain is a man of the past, a left over jingoist, cold warrior from a dead era. More than anything we need an Obama. If we fail to elect a man of the 21st Century in this next election, America may find itself irrevocably behind and out of the touch with the developing and modern world. I mean, we need more than change, we need someone who in his psyche and very synaptical being is modern. This is it for America. Get with it or get lost. Will the religionists hold America back and multiply its inevitable decline?

Today, Sunday, I passed yet another rich suburban church, it's lot crammed full of SUVs and other gas hogs, i.e. terror supporters. I imagined I was seeing the ancient linkage of the rich and powerful and the church, just as one found them linked in Franco's Spain, pre-revolutionary Russia, and Dicken's England, and currently, Arabia's Imam's and political rulers. The fat ladies are singing all over America. One out of four Americans is now obese. Is the game nearly over? And has America lost it? Or, at minimum, lost the way?

CHINA'S OLYMPIC SPRINT IS NEARING ITS END

As you newspaper readers know, China's international image is supposed to be enhanced by its Olympian effort, but internal and external politics, repression and secrecy have made them to show themselves as exactly what they are, a despotic government, but, strange to say, China's history with the West has made its average citizens extremely mistrustful of our motives. (The imperialist past coming home to roost?) So there's a twist on the old story about empires, dictatorships and democracies that we don't often meet. Read below and weep:

[SNIPPER]
If the Games do not go well, there will be infighting and blame shifting within the party's central leadership, and it will likely adopt a bunker mentality. Vice President Xi Jinping, the government's point man on the Olympics and President Hu Jintao's heir apparent, would likely face challenges to his presumed leadership.

A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority. This inflamed form of Chinese nationalism could be the most enduring and dangerous outcome of the protests surrounding the Olympics. If the international community does not welcome China's rise, the Chinese people may ask themselves why China should be bound by its rules. As a result, Beijing may find the room it has for foreign policy maneuvering more restricted by public opinion. [All we have to do is imagine how Americans feel when their national honor is challenged. Stupid, yes, but explained by evolutionary biology? Yes also.]

This is from the magazine I hold in my hand (to your right) from July/August 2008 by Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal. Damn, I can't get it to turn itself right side around. Well, you'll just have to read backwards or print it out and hold it up to a mirror. No wait, I flipped it upside down, snapped the picture, then turned the result upside down. At least I think I did.
[PASTER]

WILL THEY APE HUMAN BEHAVIOR?

I mentioned a few entries back that maybe we human animals might want to start thinking about our animal cousins in a different way, and, it seems, the Spaniards are doing just that—at least about some of our animal cousins. The following information is from the venerable New York Times:

[SNIPPER HERE]
…the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month [voted] to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.
[PASTER HERE]

CONDOLENCES TO THE CONDOLEEZZA, BUSH’S BLUNDERBUSS

I just this morning read Condoleezza Rice’s report in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. Interesting how she reported on our current foreign affair objectives without once showing us how Bush has screwed them all up. For example, on Page 7, she believes that the rise of an alliance of certain unnamed democracies in Asia along with Japan and Australia will counterbalance the increasing influence of China in that region. She forgets to mention that a recent poll in Australia shows that Australians trust China more than they trust America. So much for that alliance.

About Iraq, she writes that “the cost of this war in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagined.” (Page 21) I wonder if she or Bush or Cheney ever read any popular magazines, like Newsweek, for example, before they illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. I recall very clearly reading in many places and hearing on many TV shows just how costly our invasion and occupation of Iraq would be. Were some of our news media more astute and informed than the government which carried on the invasion? Humnnnn? Also under this heading, she failed to mention why we did not, therefore, invade other dictatorships whose practices were worse than Hussein’s.

She also continued to assert the now defunct reason for our invasion of Iraq, that is the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. She did this by going to the fallback position of the Bush administration, that Saddam was willing and ready to reconstitute his invisible weapons of mass destruction. Her assertion was an act of mind reading that surpasses the abilities of all previous American Secretaries of State, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and including James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams. (Page 21) I wonder if she’ll take up tea reading after her stint in American government?

Anyhow, I didn’t mean to make this an endlessly long recapitulation of Rice’s essay in Foreign Affairs. But you might enjoy reading it yourselves. Nowhere does she take Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to task for their blunders and failures. I think this failure of nerve on her part makes the entire presentation suspect and weak.

Note how her paragraph, following, would be more honest if she just mentioned how our American values have been most compromised, not by liberals, but by you know who and his lackey and by Republicans in general since the start of the Reagan era:

“Ultimately, however, what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination. It is this feature of the American character that most accounts for our unique role in the world, and it stems from the way that we think about our power and our values. The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States, because we do not really accept that our national interest and our universal ideals are at odds. For our nation, it has always been a matter of perspective. Even when our interests and ideals [i.e. under the Bush administration or when Republicans invaded Chile and overthrew a democratically elected government] come into tension in the short run, we believe that in the long run they are indivisible.”

PORTLAND, JESUS AND WORK SLACKS

We had a fine weekend, my wife and I. We spent a part of Saturday in Portland, walking around, shopping at the Loyd Center at Ann Taylor, where my wife found some size 2 slacks for work, finally, after much disappointment at regular stores in Vancouver, our new hometown. Then we took in a movie, "Bloodline", which expands on and furthers the Holy Grail story found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Jesus Papers. In the end, director Bruce Burgess presents some striking evidence that will leave you agape. So watch it if you can before the Vatican burns the film at the stake. Later we ate Indian food which Mertie liked and which I hated. Not that I haven't had good Indian food, but this was so bad that I gagged when I followed one taste with the taste of a cucumber gruel. Really... I gagged. On a Sunday of love, we later walked along the river hand in hand and watched a horribly bad movie about sixteen wheelers gone astray on the Fear Network in the evening. We have yet to find a really good movie on that channel.

NOT NECESSARILY A CREATIONIST THOUGHT

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it, whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." —Chief Seattle

AND WHY IS SHE IMPORTANT?

In complete disagreement, I imagine, with Ray Kurzweil is Baroness Greenfield. We came across this passage in Top 75 Questions of Science

“Changing a gene will change a protein that is made in the brain, and it will have lots of widespread and varied effects. Anyone gene participates in many functions, and many functions have the participation of many genes. Those genes in turn will be active or not according to what happens in your individual lifestyle. Gene therapy and genetic screening will be helpful, but we have to be very cautious about getting people all excited about these genes.” —Susan Greenfield (a baroness and member of the British House of Lords, researches neurological diseases)

IF YOU THINK HUMANS ARE ROTTEN, WHAT WOULD THEY TELL ROBOTS?

Also in 75 Questions, we came across these fascinating thoughts about robots and humans by Marvin Minsky.

“We don't make most appliances look like people. The new point to me is the idea that we don't want people to learn to order around servants that look like people, because that's catching. If you tell a household robot to do unspeakable, disgusting, or just boring things, you'll get the hang of telling other people to. And most human interactions are rotten already. People lie, cheat, do all sorts of awful things.” —Marvin Minsky (computer and robotics pioneer)

WHAT IF THEY ARE LIKE THREE YEAR OLD CHILDREN?

Steven Wise is an animal-rights lawyer, and this is what he has to say about animal consciousness in that same magazine, 75 Questions.

“At least two basic legal rights should be granted immediately. The first is bodily integrity. We may not eat chimpanzees; we may not use them in invasive biomedical research; we may not do anything to their bodies that we may not do to the bodies of our 3-year old children. The second right to which they are immediately entitled is bodily liberty. We may not kidnap them from Africa. We may not enslave them in steel and concrete cages. In countries in which they reside but are not native, we may place them in sanctuaries for their own benefit. In Western law, autonomy is a sufficient condition for basic legal rights. Autonomy requires that individuals be conscious, able to desire and act intentionally to achieve those desires, and have a sense of self sufficiently developed to allow them to understand that the life they're leading is their life, that what happens to them matters to them. Strong cases for the attribution of these two basic legal rights can be made for all the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans; for cetaceans, such as dolphins; and for elephants and African gray parrots.”

That magazine, Top 75 Questions of Science, which I bought for my flights to and from Ohio has been an interesting brief on many matters which science is causing us to consider. It worked exactly as I meant it to. I did not have to give complete and deep attention to the reading, yet it filled some of my otherwise boring hours on planes and in airports.

JINGOISTS NEVER GET SMARTER

A few years back, a motel in Airway Heights, Washington changed its name from Baghdad Motel to something so forgettable that I can't remember what it's now called. Guess I'll never be staying there! Seeing that so many American troopers died in Baghdad, it seems sort of tragic that people don't want to honor the name of that city in which they died, doesn't it? You'd think that a patriotic fellow would speak with great reverence of the "Battle of Baghdad" rather than forget the location of such a long and fatal conflict. Anyhow. . . jingoists and the politically correct were no smarter sixty years ago than they are today. Remember Freedom Fries? Well think Sauerkraut. . . now there's another horrible name we should never again speak!

The following passage is from the Betty Smith novel of 1943, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I didn't much like the style of the book. Too old fashioned for me, but the speakers are living in 1918, the year that America entered the First World War, and this is what they said. You get the picture, don't you?


"Send Francie. The last time I asked for sauerkraut he chased me out of the store," complained Neeley.

"You've got to ask for Liberty Cabbage now, you dope," said Francie.

"Don't call each other names," chided Katie [their Mom] absentmindedly.

"Did you know they changed Hamburg Avenue to Wilson Avenue,” asked Francie.

"War makes people do funny things," sighed Katie.


As a kid, I recall the movie made from the book. It moved me nearly to tears. They also made a play out of it. Many people adore the book. An Irish actor named James Dunn (I think) got an Oscar for his supporting role as the lovable alcoholic father of Peggy Ann Garner, the lovable sweet adorable wonderful loving obedient innocent. . . (you get the picture) child daughter. Ah we was so innercent then, were we not?

SCUMBAG BUSHITES HIT NEW LOWS

These are real actions that threaten to undermine freedom and democracy. When justice is aimed to help or hinder one’s political enemies and friends, then justice is as dead as a Nazi or Communist doornail. How does this differ from what’s happening in Zimbabwe except for murder? Or communist Russia or Nazi Germany? And if this perversion of justice can happen in a Republican government, how long before neocons decide that political murders are justified? The scary thing is that neocon Bushmen don’t even see what and how bad they are.

Here's one of the scumbags now>>>>>>>>>>>

[SNIP]
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 24, 2008; 11:50 AM

Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs, sometimes rejecting otherwise qualified candidates because of their ties to Democrats, internal auditors said in a report issued this morning.

The long awaited review faulted Bush administration officials for violating Justice Department policy and civil service rules beginning in 2002, when they tried to fill career posts with rookie lawyers whose political affiliations mirrored their own.

Investigators for the Justice Department's Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees legal ethics, reviewed thousands of e-mail messages and conducted interviews with current and former officials, concluding that the hiring efforts "undermined confidence in the integrity of the department's hiring processes."
[PASTE]

SOME SCIENCE FROM CBS SOURCES

The noose keeps getting tighter around the neck of the Bible literalist. The only trouble is that he doesn’t know his neck is in the noose. He thinks it is an imaginary noose that god put there to trick the rest of us. But, “my goodness sakes alive” (as my Grandmother used to say), it seems that his god is tricking him. I can clearly see the noose around his fundamentalist neck. I certainly know my senses tell me it’s not around mine. I trust my senses pretty much and don’t go in much for his non-sense. (But, I also know that I can't always trust my senses either. They do trick us sometimes. But then, pity the poor believer—he's twice tricked!)

[SNIP]
(AP) Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/26/tech/main4210989.shtml
[PASTE]

[SNIP]
Fossil studies have long suggested modern birds were descended from T. rex, based in similarities in their skeletons.

Now, bits of protein obtained from connective tissues in a T. rex fossil shows a relationship to birds including chickens and ostriches, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur," Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Harvard University said in a statement.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/tech/main4044053.shtml?source=related_story
[PASTE]

LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Not too many months back (or years or weeks—sometimes the years fly like months these days and the weeks drag like years) I mentioned coming across the idea (I don’t know where) that the British and American peoples will no longer be able to understand one another’s languages in 200 years. Then, in order to join a book group, I recently read The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night by a British author Mark Haddon. I know... I also mentioned that very recently. Anyhow, recalling what I’d said about language differences, I started to jot down some British idioms and words in that novel which might be beginning to stretch the bounds of an illiterate American’s understanding of the Brits. Most of the list I’m about to enter into this blog I still understand but only because I watch and have watched many British films in my life and also still read British literature, classic as well as modern, and, of course, I had the context of each of the following words and phrases. I added two final examples Sunday night that I don’t understand… from a Masterpiece Theater presentation.

The list with my interpretations… (or not):

shift it = get moving
hop it = get moving
“I’m not having you scarping….” = something about stealing
“…go for another wee…” = go take a piss
invigilator = someone who monitors a student’s test
cooker = an outdoor grill
“end of a skip” = this is something (?) parked at a curb a boy was hiding behind
boot = trunk of a car (this, of course, is an old one)
carriageway = a highway (it’s obvious but quaint to our ears)
“get a place to live of our own” = can see a shift in prepositional usage
“got a job on the till” = work as a cash register, also note use of preposition
a plaster = band aid, I think, from its usage
knock you up = come knock on your door, very old
“Hooray Harrys for a knees up” = first half pretty clear, but second …?
curb crawling = cruising for prostitutes

Of course, I think I mentioned that I can still read Shakespeare (500 years ago) and, even, with the help of a dictionary, Chaucer (700 years), but no farther back than that. I took one quarter or two of Old English around 1980, and Old English is very much like a foreign language to modern usage. So perhaps whoever suggested that we’ll soon not understand the Brits was rushing it a bit, but when one realizes that so many young Americans no longer read… well, who knows? Of course young people the world over are developing a chat room language (you know… LOL and OMG?) that I can’t understand at all. Maybe they’ll develop a worldwide language out of that which will be the first truly global language. You know, we elders of the tribe are always seeing the end of the world in every little cultural tremor when, usually, it really is no more than a tremor which workarounds can fix.

WHAT IS IT?



Okay, here's a photo from a blog I sometimes visit, a blog that originates in Estonia. Now the young lady who takes these photos can be a bit unusual at times, and I was thrown off by the photo myself. At first I thought it was one very dangerous photo, then, I thought I saw what it really is. Maybe you'll maybe have to ask her what it is. I think she was trying to be suggestive and clever which she most always is... clever, that is.
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JESUS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WHO BETRAYED HIS CAUSE

So here’s the story on Jesus, according to Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers. He also co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Jesus Paper’s is an addition to the latter book and further explains Jesus’s mission (which changed in mid stream according to Baigent) his marriage to Mary Magdalene and their disappearance into France with the help of Roman authorities after a faked crucifixion.

Let me admit, however, that Michael Baigent writes in a very circuitous manner, in such a way that one wonders why his narrative does not travel in a straight line. It leaps back and forth in time. Is this a fault in his method? Is this the only way he can work his thesis in a satisfactory manner, or is it that a more straightforward methodology would make his case appear weaker? Frankly, I think the case for Jesus being a revolutionary rather than the son of God, as the Catholic Church claimed and passed on to the Protestants, is very strong. After that, I don’t know, but if those two letters (read on) are true, wow, what a smack to the senses of anyone raised in our modern world so much dominated by the “People of the Book” (Muslims, Christians and Jews). Another point, after reading this book and several others, I and no objective person can believe in the facts as presented in the Bible, the Koran or anywhere else. Baigent and others have clearly revealed just how much empty supposition goes into every line of the Bible and its interpretations. When you finish reading The Jesus Papers, you should realize that everything is a chimera, created by people who had a political motive to interpret everything just as they did rather than a spiritual one.

According to Baigent, Jesus (because he descended from the house of David) was chosen at an early age by Zealots to fulfill the Old Testament mission of a promised Messiah who would lead them on a political war against the Roman authorities. Thus Jesus consciously fulfilled the many prophecies of the Old Testament, but he had spent part of his undiscovered youth in Egypt where he came across the sort of mysticism which informed early Greek and Egyptian religions. He became an initiate of those mysteries by which people learn to have visionary experiences in caves and dark underground places in Egypt. The Greeks called this inward journey visiting the Netherworld, the Egyptians called the underground journey going to the “Far-world”, and Christians called it, and still do, the “Kingdom of Heaven within”. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Not out there >>>. We modern people, of course, understand that people from everywhere have always sought these transcendent moments through the use of drugs or sensory deprivation in deep caves or in modern chambers that are much like wombs or in groups full of music and shouting. We recognize them as self-induced psychological experiences rather than spiritual experiences. Baigent points out the many passages in the New Testament and in the scrolls from Nag Hammadi and in the Dead Sea scrolls where it is clear that the mystics of those days, one of which Jesus became, believed they could journey to these places of death and return by initiations that only the initiate knew how perform.

Baigent further claims that there is a written message that Paul took for his own purposes that split the Jewish tradition between the political Zealots and James, Jesus’s brother, and the messianic Jews who eventually became the Christianity of the Roman Church which is based on the unsubstantiated claim that Jesus arose from the dead and is, essentially, God. The Vatican to this day is trying to suppress and hide the fact that there is much evidence that shows that Jesus never claimed to be God and, of course, never was God, that all he spoke of were these mystical moments when an initiate could think he had personally experienced the realms of the gods. Baigent claims that Jesus revealed his changed course when he was asked if the Jews of Jerusalem ought to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor. The Zealots felt double-crossed when Jesus said that they should pay those taxes. That’s why Judas Iscariot (sicarii = knife bearer and, thus, Zealot) betrayed him to the Roman authorities. Jesus was no longer useful to the Zealots.

Of course you must read this book for yourself because Baigent must work long and hard to tie all the loose ends together. The kicker to the book, coming at the very end, is that Baigent saw with his own eyes two letters (circa 32CE that he could not translate to read) which were in the hands of a wealthy private Jewish collector of antiquities. He believed they were authentic and written by a “bani meshiha—the Messiah of the Children of Israel”. The letter writer is defending himself to the Sanhedrin against charges that he had called himself the “son of God”. He explains that he did not mean that he was physically the son of God but only that he is spiritually adopted as a son of God, and that anyone who is filled with a similar spirit can also, in that sense, call himself a son of God. Thus, Jesus is not God and never was. As you can see, if these letters are authentic, they can change the course of history, but, as of yet, in the murky world of antiquities, they have not yet been surfaced by this collector or by anyone he sold them to, if he did sell them, if they are, indeed, letters written by Jesus in his own defense. Interesting, eh? Much more interesting than that hanger in dry dusty Southwestern America.