I SENT THIS TO SENATOR MCCAIN

Thank you for trying to reinstall the Glass-Steagall Act. I wish you great success. As a Dem, I was happy that we again led the way in getting a minority candidate elected President as we did with the first Catholic president. I wish a handful of truly responsible Congresspersons would get together and make some honest decisions about what the Federal government can do better and more cheaply than the private sector and, then, fund those things well and turn the rest over to private enterprise. 

Health care is one of those things that the federal government can do better, so why not get on board there, Senator? The private insurance health industry has admitted repeatedly that they can't do the job as inexpensively as the feds can. Aside from a few really important and public things that the feds can do, most business should be private enterprise, as long as the private sector is well regulated. The private sector proved that when they are let to run loose, they are greedy and irresponsible as anyone. 

Thanks for you years of service to our nation. Many long years ahead. Why don't you try to build up a strong independent party that could take Congress out of this endless cycle of hateful irresponsibility that excessive partisanship has created?

Obama Jobs Summit Will Include Business Leaders: Google, Disney CEOs To Attend

I'm so far to the left that people in the middle might call me a Socialist, or worse, a Communist, but I believe in free markets and small businesspeople as the best way to distribute wealth (even though they're the ones who'd probably call me a Socialist). Somewhere in the real middle of all this current economic chaos is a position which realizes that government is necessary and useful to provide certain social benefits that the private market is not suited to provide and that, yes, it may take higher taxes for all (who can afford them) in order to build the sort of safety net that makes being on the bottom less onerous. Of course we need to guard the door very carefully through which we decide to send those in need of aid so that the undeserving don't make it through, but we need to be fair... some people just can't compete in today's markets for one of many reasons. Should we let them and their children starve? Also, we ought to admit that religious charity isn't the best way to handle poverty because the religious just can't help making their charities opportunities to preach. Thus the vulnerable become the most susceptible to religious indoctrination.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Shocked--or Not? New Data Shows Abortion Quite Common on Most Red States

Well, here's another list that, as usual (if it's unfavorable traits the Southland tops it and if it's a list of favorable traits the Southland comes in toward the bottom) proves it's better to live anywhere but in the American South.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

WHEN THE AMERICAN DREAM FAILS

How will we know if the American Dream has failed? I can think of two sure signs:

1) If there were only one religion and 2) if there were no atheists.

GLOOM AND DOOM...

Rainy coastal weather today and I've just come from my physical therapy for recovery from torn rotator cuff surgery. Almost done with it and will soon just have exercises at home. 

Sitting at Tulley's, having me wee bit a caffeine and thinking (always trouble) about this writing thing I'm struggling with again. Every time I approach the idea of working on my memoir, I feel conflicted (tense), then when I decide I won't write today because I don't feel like it, I feel conflicted again. I used to struggle the same way back in the drinking days, long ago. Can't win for feeling, yet I've got to get a good way of proceeding or I'll stop again, just like I've stopped so many other times on long projects. Part of my trouble is that I can't imagine this having any outcome but for myself. No realistic idea of publishing it, and without that aim, I find it hard to justify the work I'll need to put into it. Already have more than 150 pages and far enough along not to stop, but this is where I've stopped so many times in the past. If I try to tell myself I'm doing it to give to my progeny on flash drives, then I hesitate to put some of the stuff I need to put into it for the sake of honesty. 

THE REPUBLICAN HATE FRONT

Republicans love to claim that we all hate Palin, but what about the hateful things Republicans like Lynn Vincent and Sarah Palin say about other Americans? Lynn Vincent, Sarah's ghost writer, is notoriously anti-gay and wants to deny them the CIVIL right of marriage even though the Constitution says nothing about gays. Only in the Bible are gays so defamed, and the Bible is not the basis of American law, the Constitution is. If these Bible Bibbers would only put the Constitution ahead of their religious books, then America could get on with being a nation of laws rather than a medieval cesspool on the verge of another Inquisition. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

ANSWER THE CHARGE OF HATRED OF GOD

In response to the following statement "(1) God doesn't exist, and (2 they hate him" which appeared on the Columbian newspaper website from a man attacking "liberals",
I entered the following response:

Let me assure you, I don't hate god. I have absolutely no feeling whatsoever about the tremendously generalized idea about a superbeing that created this universe. I care about as much about this hypothetical superbeing as I do about Martians in space ships visiting the Earth or the idea of Santa Claus which I used to put a great deal of stock in. I was tremendously disturbed when I heard that Santa didn't exist, but I got over it.

The idea of god is a scientific hypothesis about how and why the universe appears as it does to the human consciousness. Currently, the god hypothesis has no evidence whatsoever for its validity. One proof, of course, would be to find and photograph the angels waving their swords at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to keep us humans from getting at the Tree of Eternal Life. They were put there to be seen and should still be there. I can't find anywhere in the Bible that they were relieved of duty so where are they?

Currently all the evidence available to us supports the idea that the beginning of the universe came about 15 billion years ago in a tremendous and unexplained explosion which is evidenced to our ears in TV static and to our eyes through the Hubble telescope and our being able to tell by light shift that the Cosmos is expanding at an ever increasing speed out in all directions. As far as we can measure and think, the material universe itself is as infinite and eternal as any possible spiritual entity, if and when we can ever, through our material senses, record this supposed "spiritual" realm that some have great hope in to reward them for obedience and to torture everyone else who doesn't agree with them... like me, for example. As far as I know about who hates who, my wishes for Christians aren't half so hateful as to include a place where they'll be eternal tortured for not agreeing with me.


AS TO A LOCAL PRAYER BREAKFAST (the Xtian tool for corrupting our Constitutional guaranteed secular governance),

I replied:

My wife suffered the unintended oppression of working for an organization in another city in which some members networked every day at lunch on the job with the boss to pray together. Quite naturally when people meet together on a regular basis, drawn together by a common purpose, they tend to grow closer together than those who don't share their common purpose and don't meet with them. "In" people tend to trust "in" people more than the "out" people in any organization. This is a well-documented phenomena in group dynamics. It's also the problem that all minorities of any kind deal with daily in any culture. That's why our Constitution is specially designed to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority. It's why "separation of church and state" was implemented in our Constitution. Our founding fathers knew what it meant to be oppressed by religious majorities.

To return to my wife's case. Turns out that every time an opening occurred in the management network of the place where my wife worked, people who networked together in prayer (several also attended the same church) were selected more often to fill the openings. Not only that, certain of the males who networked together in prayer, openly espoused the Christian idea that women's work was in the home. One of those men eventually came into authority over my wife, and when she was asked to do some (what seemed to her) questionable things, she respectfully disagreed with the Christian in charge and suggested other ways to handle the situation at hand. Her manager (like so many Christian males) was not able to handle being disagreed with by a woman who ought to be at home (and who did not pray as he prayed) and soon he fired her for insubordination. I should mention that all my wife's suggestions were offered within the framework of staff meetings where such matters are supposed to be offered up and discussed. This Christian male was way out of line. 

My wife is a quiet, conscientious sort of employee. It's not her usual way to create disturbances where she works. When she recently received her Masters in Public Administration and was honored at an awards ceremony for their top students, her supervising professor said, "M______, no matter what, she's always the consummate professional."

My wife could have, of course, pursued this injustice as a sex discrimination case, but, as I said, my wife's a quiet sort who doesn't seek trouble and we didn't really have the resources to embark on such a course of action. However, she was so much in the right that the president of that little incestuously Christian office, after a sweaty and nervous apology to my spouse, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her. It was so glowing that one wonders why she was fired? Get the idea?

My point is that no matter how unintended, when people join together in groups (prayer or otherwise), they are building networks which favor the in people and exclude the out people. It doesn't help that I know for certain that many of the people in attendance at these little pools of incipient prejudice are there only to protect their prestige and standing with others who might benefit them in business. Sad that freedom of belief is so suppressed in our culture that average businessmen must pretend to a strong belief that they don't necessarily have in order to further their business interests. Very few people in America are courageous enough to buck the prejudices of the majority Christians until after they've retired and are free to think differently than the majority. It's an age old tale.

If I found a businessman whose services or products I needed who was courageous enough to buck the Christian power elite of Vancouver, I'd do business with him/her in heartbeat. I'd know he had integrity for sure, whereas all those in attendance at these well-publicized networking opportunities for the majority Christian power structure are highly suspect in my eyes.

AN ADAPTATION CALLED MORALITY

The following is a commentary I entered into the debates that go on all the time on the Columbian website in Vancouver, Washington:

Ray M.... Since it's now tomorrow, I don't know if you'll read this.

You mention a couple of excellent rules for behavior within a culture and, then, credit them to the Bible. Actually, those ideas are inherent within the human animal as we evolved through time. You will find those rules within all cultures and religions, past and present, with slight modifications. I'm an atheist, and I don't need a hypothetical superbeing to tell me that I ought to feel bad if someone steals something of value from me. My feelings inform me pretty well as to how nasty stealing feels, so of course I want laws to protect me from thieves. Bible people just wrote down what people were feeling at the time about the thieves among them and the adulterers, et cetera. Now, of course, we've learned that adulterers are always among us and that, often, those most vociferous about the evils of adultery are the ones practicing it on the sly.

Some will now say, "But what about people whose feelings don't agree with yours?" There are such people as that. They're called sociopaths, and they threaten cultural norms, but most people have evolved the same feeling structure as their neighbors and, thus, agree as to common rules for good social harmony. Less threatening and more helpful are those people who aren't comfortable within whatever culture they're born into. They are always demanding that we reevaluate our cultural priorities. If we didn't change and adapt, of course we'd die out as a species, so those people are healthy in a society. People like the latter brought us democracy. Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that Martin Luther brought needed reform to the Catholic Church, and Protestantism soon followed. Hopefully, Richard Dawkins will help end Protestantism and usher in Humanism as an ethical basis for cultural cohesion.

People interested in the subject of how morality is an adapted trait might like to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

THE TWO OF US IN PORTLAND'S
JAPANESE GARDENS

This is for Kerly to see the two of us lovebirds: George and Mertie in Vancouver, WA.

The photo is by a friend called Carl who I once upon a time taught English to at Vandalia-Butler
High School. We then became hippy friends after my first divorce and shared a walkup flat with others of like mind. We often drove up to Yellow Springs to watch foreign films at the Little Art Theater.

MY COMMENT ON A COLUMBIAN ARTICLE

Read the article here.

Gosh, I wish I was rich enough to own 83 foot schooners, then I might be able to see through the eyes of a rich person, to walk in his shoes. But I made my shot at it and, like most, was not able to find room in that 1% of Americans who rule America and its economic fortunes. So I do my best to vote in such a way to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and to keep the American middle class from being further eroded by the decisions of politicians who are in the pockets of schooner owners.

The best way to protect America and its Constitution is to do everything in our power to make sure that a good strong middle class continues to exist and that poverty does not grow to undermine social stability—even if it might mean increased taxes and allowing Bush's tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans to lapse. Thus defended, the Constitution won't be so stressed in its efforts to protect all Americans as to fail. Laws without a human touch are bound to fail eventually.  

Most interesting is the name of the schooner. Sounds like just in pre-WW II Spain, in South America, and in the Catholic Church during Hitler's regime, religion is being put into the service of the wealthy to suppress the poor and other minorities. One of the things to guard against that history has taught us is when the church forgets Christ's message to serve the poor and begins to politicize itself and become a mouthpiece for the rich. Such a historical trend is now coming to America in a big way. Since we're a younger country and have not learned that lesson, I fear we'll someday have our turn at fascism too. 

THE COLUMBIAN (VANCOUVER WA PAPER) WON'T ACCEPT THIS LENGTH

I like free market principles. Here in America they've done a wonderful job of stopping inflation dead in its tracks. With so many people out of work, no one except the richest 12% can afford to buy anything. That definitely keeps prices in check. And wages too.

Let's see: the free market (i.e. unbridled greed) has brought us outlandish CEO benefits and income, the Savings and Loan mess, the dot.com bust, the great Depression and current great Recession, bank failures galore, exploding gold values (for those who can afford gold), the collapsing dollar, corporate corruption, corporate ownership of the Republican part of the US Congress (think Tom Delay and his K Street project), a widely increasing gap between the richest Americans and the poorest, a continually shrinking middle class, the outsourcing of our entire manufacturing base (in search of profits first) along with its good-paying jobs, mortgage failures, the destruction of unions by which working men and women used to have some say about their pay rather than being totally dependent on what their bosses want to pay them (except when Dems manage to raise the minimum wage), financial collapse, cheap come-on printers with expensive ink, ownership of much of America by China and other big investors. Yes, the one thing we do not want is for we voters to have any control whatsoever over the economic forces that dominate our lives.

As to private health care insurance—haven't we seen where that takes us? The public option for health insurance is just that, an OPTION. No one has to use it, so let's try it out and see what happens. If we don't like it after 5 years or so, we can change it, drop it or keep and expand it. It's optional for Pete's sake. What's to fear? Only those who know it might succeed as well as Medicare to hold costs in check fear the public OPTION.

Another thing about private insurance with many competing plans. We've seen how the financial industry has bamboozled the average American with small print and hidden clauses and devious practices when it comes to credit cards. They have no scruples when it comes to profits. To make correct health care choices, one even now has to be an insurance whizzbang to always make the correct choices, and the insurance industry will do everything in its power to fool and trick the average American who, every year, becomes less literate and less able to inform himself by carefully reading the small print. We already have much anecdotal evidence about health insurance surprises for people who did not know exactly what they were getting when they tried to save money on health insurance. I've had occasion to appeal a health insurance claim. Talk about devious decisions and lawyer-like ways to use language to obfuscate an issue! They're masters at it already.

I'll tell you this, when I see widespread honesty at the highest levels of corporate life and a desire to balance profits with social responsibility, then I'll turn my economic welfare over to unregulated, free market capitalism. I can at least vote for change when it comes to politicians and a public OPTION in health care insurance.

SEEING IS NOT HEARING or MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING

We went to see our play and our seats were three-quarters back on the lower level, maybe a bit farther from the stage than that, so I couldn't hear about 3/4 of the play. My ears are truly shot. I can understand that I could have used hearing aids in that one situation of live theater. I think they'd have helped, but in a movie theater, not usually. I try not to remember when I sat in theaters and could hear everything. Not hearing well distances me from people and situations, but even hearing devices that I use in movies don't help when there's background music or street sounds or when characters whisper. If I'd been able to get seats closer, I'm sure I'd have heard just fine. The last time my wife and I went to Interplayers in Spokane I could hear just fine and my son's improv performances are always hearable. 

I'm looking for science to find a way to re-stimulate the little hairs that increase hearing, but the hearing aid and hearing aid battery industry is so huge, I wonder if research is really underway on hearing defects. Hearing aids, like vision aids, are in the control of non-professionals whose sole purpose is to sell devices. They'd hate to see medical treatments that would improve hearing, yet I'm sure that someday, it'll be as simple as a drug or other treatment to restore almost complete hearing ability. 

PS: It didn't rain, not a whisper of it. 

EATING EXPENSIVELY

We've eaten at two pricey restaurants in this tourist town of Ashland in which Southern Oregon University is located and the Shakespearean Festival. We conclude that all spendy restaurants feature at least two things. One is slow service. The other is food without much flavor. We conclude that Wolfgang Puck has an audience of jumble-brained patsies. Bring me some roast and fried potatoes. 

DEMONSTRATING IGNORANCE TO MANY PEOPLE

Today, my wife and I drove over to the Crescent City on the Northern California coast. Coming back along I-5, we passed a garage or shed with its back to the highway. On its surface in large letters, its owner had written: PRAISE GOD.

My wife and I laughed. Praise God. Is that the being who doomed the entire human race to die because they exercised the supposedly free will he'd given them to use in a free way? What's to praise? Seems he really didn't mean them to have free will except as limited by his king like orders. So they weren't actually free. So, for disobeying a little thing like eating and becoming as wise as god imagined he was wise, this god fellow murders every human being on earth, constantly, each and every day. Then, as atonement for his unrelieved cruelty toward the human race, he makes it up by killing his own son. That's right, two wrongs somehow make a right. 

Then there's another piece of insanity in that whole scenario. As I recall, this hypothetical superbeing was afraid that his human slaves would eat of the tree of life and have eternal life. Now wait a minute. I thought these human being already had eternal life. That's why god decided that they must die, that he must take away their eternal lives, but then why was he afraid that they'd eat of the tree of life since they already had eternal life before he doomed them to die? Something awfully circular and crazy in this whole account of the origins of the human species and life and death. Funny no one ever noticed these things back in the darkest days of human intelligence. Seems that for humankind to really get wise and intelligent, they took many millennia. Why did this hypothetical superbeing think that ignorant twosome had grown wise in the first place? They were pretty ignorant after all, so if their intelligence, dim as it was, nearly equaled his intelligence, he (the hypothetical one) was himself dumb as a post. Lot's of twists and turns in here, aren't there? 

Praise god, my ass. Glad to be rid of the hypothesis of him, I'd say. 

HELLO FROM SHAKESPEARE

So... for the first time since I've lived out west (30+years), I've come down to Ashland, Oregon with my spouse, Mertie, for to see its Shakespeare Festival which runs nearly year round. We two groundlings are going to see Much Ado About Nothing on Saturday night, and, of course, there's a 60% chance of rain on Saturday night with temps down into the 50s. We've chosen a play being presented in the open air arena, a mockup of the Stratford theater where Mr. Shakespeare, himself, presented his plays. Of course, everyone we talk to down here tells us it never rains when a play is being presented, miraculously. Yes, the weather is in sympathy with Shakespeare. Or is it the doubling and troubling three witches up on the barren hillsides that surround Ashland who control the weather? Or could it be the local chamber of commerce, making sure that such rumors float North on the lips of groundlings like Mertie and I?

More later.

MORE CHURCH SIGN NONSENSE

A recent local church sign read: "Character—what you do when no one's looking."

Of course, I thought. But then I thought deeper. Pride, I believe, is one of the 7 deadly sins. Well, if one becomes aware of having done a "good" deed, then he is being pridefully self-congratulatory. If one takes self-worth or pride in what he's done, then he's got the character of a sinner. In order to be free of the sin of pride, he must also be unaware of what he's done. In short, the only good deed is a thoughtless one or one done without thought at all. Actually the only act which could be considered an act free of pride (self-congratulation) would have to be an unconscious act. Of course, one can always counter-balance a good deed by telling everyone that's he's done the good deed. That would counter-balance his pride and make his act an act of good character.

Christians just never get it right, do they?

THAT WONDERFUL INTERNET

The following three communications have been a pretty consistent thing between me and my new newspaper here in Vancouver, Washington. It's a constant problem. When you think how twisted up the relationships between software designers, computer manufacturers, ISP providers, website operators and telephone/wifi/cable operators, it's no wonder that one must go to college just to understand what's going on. The whole sheebang needs to be simplified and standardized for those of us who use the internet for small daily personal transactions.


Dear Scott Campbell [Columbian's owner publisher],

> You need to get a new website manager. I spent a good half hour working on a
> comment to the article on Baird in today's paper. I've tried to enter the
> comment three times in a row now and still not getting through. This happens
> regularly, at least once a week if not more. Some people at the Columbian
> like to say that problems always occur on the internet. Well, I've never
> experienced such continuing problems on my blog at Blogger or on any of the
> regular sites that I visit. The Columbian's website is pretty awful,
> specially the comment function. I comment regularly on HuffPo and certainly
> don't experience the troubles that I have with the Columbian website.

> George [me]:
>
> I wanted to make sure that your issue has been addressed since this original
> email. I am the web editor but we have had issues with our browser-based
> commenting system, especially where people spend significant amounts of time
> composing the comments. We have worked with your vendor to try and diagnose
> this problem but there have been no answers on their part. I would like to
> know if you are still having problems and, if so, what you're seeing.
>
> I apologize for the problems you have been having and sincerely want to know
> more.
>
> Thanks,
>
> jeff bunch
> web editor
> columbian.com
> jeff.bunch@columbian.com
> (360) 735-4699
>
> We Deliver Clark County | Reaching 64% of all adults
>
Geoff ,

The problem has been intermittent but pretty steady. Seems like about once or twice every two weeks, but I’m not keeping records.

Yes, this last time it did occur after I spent considerable time composing my comment in the comment box which is what makes the problem really frustrating. Then, of course, if I decide to write the comment on my Office Word for Mac software, and copy and paste it, the comment feature sometimes doesn't work either. I even backspaced to my original comment after several failures of the comment feature and copied the original, then left the Columbian website and returned to it and pasted that in to no avail.

Another email I sent to Lou [Columbian managing editor] listed the many ways I've tried to get around the copy and paste problem from different type faces to different browsers.

Good luck working with my vendors. I used to have a helpful, technically proficient outfit called Icehouse in the Spokane area as my ISP. I clung to them as long as I could, but Qwest made it nearly impossible to use them after we moved from Spokane to here. Now, of course, MSN, my ISP with Qwest, claims not to be able to officially work with my system. They always claim they must get out special books to answer my questions, plus I'm dealing with people in the Philippines. Sometimes, I get someone who can help an old man like me who is not at all computer literate so my experience with the Philippines isn't all bad. You'd think if a company went to the trouble to force me into their system, they'd at least feel responsible to handle my gear proficiently.

I truly believe it's time to standardize the equipment and software like phones are standardized—at least for those of us who want to use our computers to write, bank, watch snatches of news videos, and browse the internet for information. For those who like to make and steal movies, etcetera, let them spend their lives working with computer problems.

As it is right now, for example, I don't have the time to learn everything about my Microsoft Office Word word processor 2008. I'll bet I use about only 20% of its potential as it is. Why do I need the constant upgrades? I think the computer geeks who invented all this stuff have really enslaved us to their profit machine. And they did it by hooking the youth market into it which was less able to make realistic decisions.

Computers and the internet are the only businesses I know of where the business tells the consumer what he must buy and when he must buy it. It's like going into Sears and having a Sears salesmen take you to a refrigerator and telling you you must buy it because your old machine will stop working on December 5, 2009, guaranteed. It's as if they control the electrical system as well as the refrigerator manufacturing business so that they can shut you off at home and force you to come to them to buy the latest model with the latest plug. You've heard it all before, I'm sure, but my analogy is pretty accurate.

When I point these things out to members of the youth market, they don't even seem to care that their free will has been partially hijacked. "Never mind, old man, just leave me alone and let me twitter my brains out." Of course, the latest neuroscience seems to indicate that the human brain is just a fancy collection of mini-computers, and psychologists taught us long ago that it can be conditioned to accept almost anything as long as the conditioning is done correctly. This computerized world we live in makes the human automaton condition ever more evidence to people who see the bigger picture.

Well, I hope you can make contact with those who laughingly supply me with service,
--
George Thomas
Vancouver, Washington 98684

CHURCH BULLETIN BOARD, MY STYLE

I read the following on a church bulletin board: God, please help me to be the man my dog thinks I am.

I suggest that such a board ought to read: Dog, please help me to be the god man thinks I am.

JUST A RANT

Folks... I think we ought to quit getting our views from the Internet. It's just like getting facts from village gossips back in the days when there was no TV, radio, newspapers, news magazines nor logic or scientific methodology. Hardly anyone had an inkling of education. Most people never got farther from home than a day's walk, and every nation was led by a king, prince, king of kings, warlord or other potentate. People used to believe anything back then, things like "if you split open a rock from Golgatha, inside will be a little tongue, crying out about the death of Christ." Yes, miracles everyday, a world of everyday miracles. With a lifespan of about 30 years, ignorant of most facts, people trudged their streets in Babylon or Nazareth, didn’t know a thing except how to survive. Dirty and hungry they had no method for separating fact from fiction. They’d believe most any news that came from afar. In fact they’d be biased toward news that gave them hope and might not look too closely at long distance news. It's sort of like getting your news in a fundamentalist religion's holy book or from a blogger who comes to you from afar with news you want to believe is true. In short the Internet is sort of an ignorant global community full of what used to be called, in the good old days, superstitious and ignorant “back fence gossips”. We can believe none of it.

TORN ROTATOR CUFF

If you think the pace of my entries has slowed down... watch. I just tuesday came out of surgery to repair the above. My right arm's in a sling for 6 to 9 weeks. This is a one finger exercise and there won't be many of these.

JUST WHAT I'VE ALWAYS SUSPECTED

"The study tracked subscriptions for a top-10 seller of online adult entertainment (2006-2008) and using ZIP code data associated with those subscriptions, compared the data with numbers from the FCC that tracks the amount of broadband Internet users in any given state. One of the findings from the study revealed that online subscriptions are 'more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality.' "

Source: Red Light States: Who Buys Adult Entertainment, By Benjamin Edelman ; FCC Report: High Speed Services for Internet Access

But where's the Bible Belt in this? My expectations were disappointed when I didn't see Alabama and Georgia, North and South Carolina. Florida is understandable. Lots of seniors there who might need a little lift off boost for the Viagra ride.

FROM HUFFPO TO US:

The following reference to pain is from The Princess Bride by William Goldman: "Life is pain and anyone telling you different is selling something."

Now that's true and it goes for everybody from religious people to plastic surgeons, but, on the other hand, watch out for someone who wants to sell you a vision of the world that's all pain too. Usually, they've got something behind their back that they want to sell you after they convince you that the world's going straight to hell in a hand basket. I can always spot a fundamentally bent Christian because he's telling me how evil the world is, and, later, he wants to sell me Jesus's love to make me all better. Like most approaches to the "evils" of the world, the best view is a balanced view.

MY RECENT LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Conservatives claim Sotomayor’s humanity might bias her judgments in law. Fact is, if she were liberal, she’d be less likely to enforce biased judgments. Recent brain imaging studies show that the conservative brain is less able to entertain two competing ideas. In short, conservative biases are unyielding whereas liberals might alter an outworn bias through new information. Adaptive change is the key to survival.

No one is objective, least of all someone who imagines they’re objective. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest human behavior is more robotic than we’d like to think. The synaptic connections which determine human personality are limited by genetic makeup and altered by life experience. By imaging brain activity, we observe that human actions are triggered before the brain becomes conscious of choice. For example, words form before we’re conscious of choosing them. The batter’s nervous system begins to swing milliseconds before he thinks to swing.

LONG TIME NOSEE

I've got to make an entry. It's been so long. That's because I'm working my way through an algebra textbook, working on my book Boomed Out: a mythical memoir of a Silent between generations, and trying to keep up on my personal reading and my reading of books for "Page Turners", my book club. Currently reading Three Cups of Tea ghosted by David Relin for Greg Mortenson for the book club.

Came across this idea while reading Three Cups of Tea. The Taliban would be right at home in America's deep south Bible belt. In Afghanistan, while they were in power, the Taliban set up a "Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". These people were book burners and anti-science almost as thoroughly as Bush's White House. The Taliban wouldn't let medical students study anatomy or view drawings of human anatomy. Imagine how much they loathed evolution! That's why the Taliban is a perfect fit for the American South. All those promise keepers who've gone on to cheat on their wives would flock to the Taliban whose values are just like their own.

THOSE MIXED UP NEURONS

After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.

So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.

These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.

Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?

A WHOLE IN ONE

The other day I had an insight as to the whys and wherefores of my life. I think what I have to say might sound almost mundane, but like so many things in a man's life, I may have known something for the longest time, but until I actually focus awareness on it, the real force of the insight remains lost. 

I've been an atheist probably as far back as I can think, with some lapses and backsliding into belief under the duress of painful times. In short, when I am most weak and helpless is when I make decisions about gods and powers of greatness that I normally would not make. 

I don't know why I came to be an atheist, but as a teen, I probably said I was an atheist in order to shock people. The other day, though, I understood something about atheism that I'd not noted before. I was thinking about the book I'm writing and was trying to phrase a central theme of it when I chanced upon the following thought: my life seems to be directed toward the purpose of seeing myself as I truly am beyond or outside of the consciousness of a judging god. 

To live godless builds a truly human way of evaluating life. I think atheism is allowing me to quit having a split nature, seeing myself at one time as a human animal and at another time as a constructed creature at the mercy of a whimsical god like the gods of the Bible or Koran. The end of dualism is the end of being split, coming to live within existential doctrine. I'm sure that's what the existentialists were hoping for—to quit living as dual people and to be as one. 

To think as an atheist one escapes the duality of good and evil. As long as one is encumbered by the good versus evil continuum, he cannot help but be judgmental. His consciousness is bathed in good and evil thinking rather than in evaluating life on less onerous and practical terms. 

WRITING FROM SPACE

Long time since last entry. 

I'm at Tully's in Vancouver. Just got back from the Humanists of Greater Portland meeting. At the meeting this morning, I felt light-headed and couldn't follow the talk on "dark matter" very well. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that I didn't belong among these "smart" people so I didn't go to lunch with the sub-group that always meets for lunch following the Sunday presentations and drove straight back here to Vancouver. On the drive back I was filled with fear and a sense of worthlessness—fear and worthlessness, my old nemeses from college drinking days. As soon as I pulled into Tulley's, a place familiar to me, I was okay again. 

Like most fears, this morning's fear gathered strength and spread the more I indulged it. First thing I knew I was imagining my old age, myself in a nursing home, whining for help, trembling and begging. Not a pleasant set of feelings and imaginings. But that's just the way it goes with me sometimes, rather fewer times than in my old drinking days and in early sobriety. But my bouts with insecurity seem to be increasing in frequency again. Maybe stimulated by working on Boomed Out? Dark matter indeed!

ATHEISTS HAVE THE MOST SUSTAINABLE ETHICS

How often have we atheists been asked how atheists can have any
sense of "morality" since we have no godly law which supports our
ethical beliefs? I'm currently reading a collection of essays called,
The Sense of the Sixties, and in it, Robert Penn Warren (he wrote All
The King's Men) appeals to the same source for my guiding lights as do
most atheists and agnostics. Warren was writing an essay directed to
the situation between blacks and whites as they existed in the
mid-1960s, but his conclusions as to a good foundation for ethics is a
universal I also subscribe to.

"It would be an even more vicious illusion to think that in
trying to solve the problem he would be giving something away, would
be "'liberal," or would be performing an act of charity, Christian or
any other kind. The safest, soberest, most humble, and perhaps not the
most ignoble way for him to think of grounding action is not on
generosity, but on a proper awareness of self-interest.

"It is self-interest to want to live in a society operating by
the love of justice and the concept of law…. It is self-interest to
want all members of society to contribute as fully as possible to the
enrichment of that society…. It is self-interest to seek out friends
and companions who are congenial in temperament and whose experience
and capacities extend our own…. It is self-interest to want to escape
from the pressure to conform to values which we feel immoral or
antiquated…. It is self-interest to want to escape from the burden of
vanity into the hard and happy realization that in the diminishment of
others there is a deep diminishment of the self." —Robert Penn Warren

CONVICTION LEADS TO ERROR

The following paragraphs come from a book I'm reading presently, The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease. Laughing at Ehrenhaft, I'm forced to say that I'm 71 and I can't even find a podium. So my mumbling and grumbling about religion usually occurs in the presence of my lovely wife. Ehrenhaft, fundamentalist religious nuts of all religions and me...

"It took place in September 1946 in New York City at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society. At one session, the presentation by the young Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behavior of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, an elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of 'subelectrons,' charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and approached the podium demanding to be heard.

"A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein—who told me the story—was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert.

" 'Pais's theory is far crazier than Ehrenhaft's,' Goldstein asked Siegert. 'Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?'

"Siegert thought a moment. 'Because,' he said firmly, 'Ehrenhaft believes his theory.'
The strength of Ehrenhaft's conviction, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfaction. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effects of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science." —Robert P. Crease

THE SENSE OF THE SIXTIES

I'm reading a collection of materials from a book about the 60s. Almost all the essays seem to have appeared in the time frame between 1964 and 1966. I came across a couple of enticing comments. The two comments I have in mind came from the pen of Andrew Kopkind, one of which I'll bet he recalled (or not) not too long after he'd made it and wished he'd not made it. What political figure do you think Kopkind's remarks were about?

First and with a lot of spin toward the last resident of the White House: He "continually pressed the Johnson Administration on a Vietnam settlement" and "criticized the President for regarding the war as 'purely a military problem.' "

The next Kopkind comment is a stronger clue to the political identity I have in mind: "He can afford the luxury of the free rein because he has a precious commodity—time. Nothing much is likely to happen to him for five years, maybe more."

A ROMANTIC, ONCE I WAS
till birds did ask me leave their nest
and go among the peopled world
there to beat my breast
and leave them curled
in peace and quiet rest.


As I get further into old age and farther from the romanticism that cursed my early and mid life before science took a strong hold on my imagination and my rational brain received more nourishment than my intuitive brain, I can see how the spirit of the poem, "Song", held my senses fast. Reading a little Tennyson today, I was struck by the melancholy and somber tone of this Romantic's work, and I did get a brief glimpse of what it meant to be the romantic that I was. When I say "romantic" I don't mean it as a synonym for romantic love. I mean to imply the entire death-oriented, religion swallowing, grail-questing, hero-worshiping, pie in the sky, good versus evil seeing mental blob that is the romanticism that drives fundamentalism of all brands to go out and beat their enemies bloody, tilt at windmills and bring down towers with airplanes. I subsume religion under the heading of that romanticism.

If you need further proof, look at the picture of Tennyson.

WHAT ARE THE ODDS things are going to get worse in future rather than better? According to a New York Times article, two satellites have collided and the debris is spewing higher and lower through space:

"For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

"It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small."

PLEASE SAY IT ISN'T SO, ROMEO!

New research shows—according to an article on CBS news—that love acts like addiction in the brains of those who suffer under the lash of love. I could have told them that. Painful withdrawal symptoms can create craving, but it's wonderful when love works out. Like 20% of the couples in one study, my wife and I still bill and coo, and our VTAs must light up like the Fourth of July:

"In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

"The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.

"The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain."

What more should we expect, since emotions are adaptations for the regulation of our animal behavior? Robotics, anyone? Again we can see that feeling love toward an imaginary god in one's head would self-reward the believer for his faith with chemical enhancement. Pity the poor atheist who can only love life which and people who do not always reward him with as much feeling in return. Of course, people of faith, who are truly honest about the reality which their god has given them, must feel terrible most of the time because living is not always a friendly process. Taking that a step further—couldn't we say that Christians and Muslims and Jews are in very destructive (even sadomasochistic relationships) with their gods?

FAUX NEWS IS A REPUBLICAN GROUPY OUTFIT

From a blogger at Huffington Post comes the following. Read it and weep with laughter at the totally biased Faux (Fox) News people:

"Critics of the Fox News Channel intimate all the time that they take their marching orders and construct their dizzy little metanarratives from concise memoranda from straight out of the Republican messaging machine. But if you were to accuse the network of doing so, they'd typically respond, "Zounds! Thou wound mine honour, goode fellowe, verily!" Or, they'd have chief flack-and-Sith Lady Irina Briganti cut you, with dirty knives. But Media Matters has caught the foxy newsies in flagrante delicto passing off a press release from the Senate Republican Communications Center as their own enterprise reporting."

IF YOU THINK FOX NEWS VIEWERS ARE IGNORANT OF FACTS, YOU ARE...

The following excerpt is from The Carpetbagger Report:

"I have naively believed for years that staying informed about current events by getting some news is better than blissful ignorance derived from getting no news. Then Fox News Channel helped demonstrate just how wrong I was.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland conducted a thorough study of public knowledge and attitudes about current events and the war on terrorism. Researchers found that the public’s mistaken impressions of three facets of U.S. foreign policy — discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq — helped fuel support for the war.

While the PIPA study concluded that most Americans (over 60%) held at least one of these mistaken impressions, the researchers also concluded that Americans’ opinions were shaped in large part by which news outlet they relied upon to receive their information.

As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”

Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”"

...CORRECT!

Read the whole article here.

JUST THE FACTS, MAM

Historical population figures for Hammond, Indiana:

Census Pop. %±
1880 699
1890 5,284= 655.9%
1900 12,376=134.2%
1910 20,925= 69.1%
1920 36,004= 72.1%
1930 65,559= 82.1%
1940 70,18=3 7.1%
1950 87,595 = 24.8%
1960 111,698= 27.5%
1970 107,983= −3.3%
1980 91,985= −14.8%
1990 84,236= −8.4%
2000 83,048= −1.4%

You might ask, "George, what are you doing, posting this list of the rising and falling population of Hammond, Indiana?"

Well... in the first place, I'm crazy.

Actually, since I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, I feel particularly akin to Hammond folk, and I was doing some research on a man named Jean Shepherd. He wrote "A Christmas Story" which has become a Christmas classic about a kid named Ralphie who wanted a Red Ryder bee bee gun and whose mother was worried he'd shoot his eye out. Jean was born in Hammond and raised there and worked in the steel mills before serving in WWII in the signal corps. He died living on one of the keys in Florida, I believe. I came across the population figures and they reminded me of what happened to Dayton, Ohio. The same rise and fall in population and industry. Dayton took quite a hammering, losing Delco and National Cash Register during those years. We're talking 100,000 or more jobs. Horrible stuff. Hammond's plight is/was Dayton's plight, and they occurred in overlapping historical dates.

Anyhow, I was struck by a bolt of nostalgia, seeing those population figures for Hammond. Sometimes nostalgia takes me for a real trip, recalling my childhood and youth in the Midwestern state of Ohio, southern Ohio. And I just wanted to put that down for whoever might run across it and also have nostalgic memories. Jeez, I hate nostalgia. When I was young, I swore I'd never let nostalgia get me, but it has.

OBAMA PROMISES AMERICA'S DAY!

I recall walking a memorial walk with many African-American students and youths the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated and how we felt and how far away the American Dream of equality and freedom felt on that day. I have been in tears more than once over the past months and days and hours as I witness America's reawakening. I feel, at age 71, as if the America of my youth has returned, those past days when with innocent and hopeful feelings, I believed in the American Way and its hope and promise for the world. These past 8 years I witnessed American leaders who thought nothing of torturing helpless captives, spying on Americans and acting in ways I've always associated with the worst of world leaders. Now those dark days are past, I hope for good.

SCIENCE: IT'S TRAGIC AND IT'S FUNNY

According to an article in the London Times...

"40% of coma patients in a ‘vegetative state’ may be misdiagnosed,
says a new report: Trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead. Or so we thought. Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed. Now British scientists are leading the field in trying to put that right

"But here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. "Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer—and, as the young biker showed, attitude."

Read more about PVS here.

According to another article in the Times of London, studies by evolutionary psychologists show that:

"Wealthy men give women more orgasms"

You don't believe it, read more here.

ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM DELINEATED

Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.

Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.

The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.

Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.

I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.

You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.

“Ah, the humility! The humility!”

I'M GOING BANANAS

The following is a paragraph from a very interesting analysis of the interrelation of governments, monopolies and a bruised environment.

"Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea—and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself." — Johann Hari

Read the whole banana here.