CHECK THIS OUT

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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.
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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:

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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.
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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:

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…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?