MISSING FOR AWHILE

The blogspot wasn't working properly so I've missed a few days, but we're back up and running now.


REPUBLICAN SWIFTIES MISS THE BOAT

The question we ought to be asking the Republican Swift boat boys is why they support atrocities.

By railing against men who told the truth about the atrocities which were widespread in Nam but not universal, the Republican swifties show their support for those who commit atrocities. One can only imagine what would go on if they had anything to do with the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities. Imagine what they think of the young reservist whose conscience made him spill the beans about Abu Ghraib? Do they even respect his act of conscience?

One really must ask why these swifties can’t put Vietnam behind them and get on with their lives. So many vets I admire have been able to do that but not without facing some real truths about Vietnam and themselves and what happened to them there. These Republican swifties seem to be haunted with what I’d call a “bad conscience”. That’s why they can’t move on with their lives and put Vietnam behind them. You’d almost think they have something to hide, the way they hate those who tell the truth about Vietnam atrocities. Such hatred can only come from suppressed and hidden fears of revelation.


NOW. . . ON TO REALLY IMPORTANT MATTERS: CONSCIOUSNESS

Believe it or not, I am approaching the end of Daniel Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”. I know my reading seems slow, but I read daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and try to get in “The Humanist” and “FreeThought” magazines and just about anything else my eye falls upon. I’m still stuck at Chapter Eight with Camille Paglia. Recently I started to read a book of interviews with the film director Ingmar Bergman and sent away by interlibrary loan to Washington State University for three novels by Samuel Beckett which bore me now. When I first read Beckett, I was entranced. I believe he, like so many existentialist writers of the early 20th Century, altered my own consciousness. I’m so very pleased with what these men did for me, though, at the time, I suffered a great deal, shedding my romantic skin of despair and defeat and embattlement. I’m sending back the Beckett novels without reading more than a few pages of them.

Anyhow, here’s some more from writer Daniel Wegner who makes a strong case for “determinism” in his book, “The Illusion of Conscious Will” (2002) which I also recently used interlibrary loan to send away for:

“The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. In fact, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as the cause of the action. So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves. . . . (p. 98)

“Consciousness and action seem to play a cat-and mouse game over time. Although we may be conscious of whole vistas of action before the doings get underway, it is as though the conscious mind then slips out of touch. A microanalysis of the time interval before and after action indicates that consciousness pops in and out of the picture and doesn’t really do anything. . . .” (p. 59)
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"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." —G.B. Shaw

I include Shaw's conundrum to give a contrasting way of talking about free will as compared to the scientific way of discussing free will. Shaw is stuck in the moral world rather than the real world. Even the way that Dennett allows for free will, won't make much room for such a strong statement as George Bernard Shaw makes. I say that as long as people stay in this moral, judgmental world view, we'll have violence and war which spring out of the sense of being wronged. Even the bad guy, unless a sociopath born without conscience, usually strikes from a feeling of having been wronged. How many a man is killed in a barroom fight just because another man feels wronged, feels from his moral sense rather than his common sense?

TRIPPING IN CANADA

One afternoon as I leaned against the edge of the medium hot, large pool at the Ainsworth Hot Springs Resort in Canada, I thought about my recent trip around the U.S. and pictured a similar, but cool water pool at the Holiday Inn in Key West. I was feeling perfectly at ease surrounded by Canadians and their more laid back style of life. I saw no one acting out or exhibiting “look at me folks” behavior. I saw no driven behaviors, no one trying to show off or draw attention to themselves. Families seemed at peace and unified. The Americans I watched at the Holiday Inn less than three months ago were loud, insecure and medicating themselves with alcohol. It’s as if each was calling out for attention and “love”?

What Michael Moore observed in “Bowling For Columbine” seemed true enough that afternoon in Canada. As he pointed out, Canadians own more guns per capita than Americans, yet Canada’s murder rate is miniscule compared to America’s. Michael Moore agreed with the NRA in one important point—guns have nothing to do with America’s murderous rate, but... (here Michael differs), America’s paranoia and insecurity do. As he asks, “Should paranoid Americans be allowed to own so many guns?”

Now that we’ve got this Bush guy in charge of America, who thinks nothing of starting wars and killing people, we can definitely see Moore’s point. If I were the people of the world, I’d be arming myself to the teeth in preparation for George’s next depredation.


POLITICAL REFUGEE

I joked with my wife as we crossed the border into Canada that I ought to tell the border guard that we were political refugees from Bush’s America. She didn’t think it was too funny and, of course, you never know what sort of sense of humor someone with a gun on their hip might demonstrate, so I saved the joke for later.

Frequently, thereafter, I’d tell Canadians that my wife and I were escapees from Bush’s repressive regime in America. Not one Canadian failed to appreciate the joke and understand it. In Kaslo, one woman told us that we’d be right at home, there, if we wanted to settle in Canada. She said lots of draft dodgers from the Vietnam era settled in that region and still lived there. No wonder I experienced a marvelous inner peace during our couple of days in Canada and felt rather depressed upon reentering America.

Canadians truly understand freedom of belief and leaving one’s neighbors’ religions and attitudes alone. Under Bush’s faith-based regime and, in his own words, his wish to convert everyone to his Protestantism, America is in danger of losing its own Constitutional desire for separation of church and state and the harmony and peace that separation has given us over the few brief centuries of our nation’s history. One need look no further than Bush’s religious intolerance to understand why America is currently torn by such divisive hatreds. I have no trouble identifying the source of my hatred and fear of George Bush. It all flows from my understanding of the intolerance in his religious mandate, openly expressed, to convert others to his beliefs rather than leaving them alone to practice their own beliefs. History tells the sad tale of the pain and suffering caused by missionary zeal when it flows from the ambitions of national leadership.
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"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible hardly anything." —Goethe

VOLUNTEER LINKS KERRY AD TO BUSH CAMPAIGN

This links Bush with Swift Boat Traitors.

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — A volunteer for John Kerry said Friday he picked up a flier in a Bush-Cheney campaign office in Gainesville, Fla., promoting Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group the Bush campaign has insisted for weeks it has no connection to.

The Kerry campaign e-mailed the flier to news organizations Friday, declaring that the Bush-Cheney campaign was "busted" for coordinating "in their smear campaign against John Kerry."

At Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters outside Washington, spokesman Steve Schmidt said: "The Bush-Cheney campaign has nothing to do with that piece of paper. ... I don't know how it showed up at the campaign headquarters."

"The Bush-Cheney campaign would object to any flier like this being displayed in any Republican headquarters," said Schmidt. He characterized the campaign operation in Gainesville where the flier was found as county GOP offices used by Bush-Cheney volunteers.

The flier distributed at Alachua County Republican Party headquarters promotes a weekend rally sponsored by "Swift Boat Vets for Truth" and other groups.

Bill Shilling, a Kerry volunteer in Gainesville, says he went to the GOP offices there Thursday and picked up the flier from a pile of literature on the table.

"The flier they gave me was on the same table as some Bush-Cheney bumper stickers," said Shilling. "I asked them if the Swift boat veterans were coming to Gainesville, and the woman I talked to said yes."

Shilling said he went back to Kerry headquarters and turned over the flier.

"I thought there was supposed to be some separation between Bush-Cheney and the Swift boat controversy but I didn't understand there was a big deal about this," said Shilling. "I think this whole thing attacking Kerry's war record is a diversion by Bush-Cheney from the real issues of the campaign."

Financed by a Texas businessman with longtime ties to prominent Republicans in the state, including President Bush, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sponsored an ad featuring several Vietnam veterans who accuse Kerry of lying about the circumstances surrounding events for which he won his medals. Kerry received a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts while in Vietnam.

The anti-Kerry group distributed a second commercial to the news media and said it would begin airing the ad next week in Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Mexico, the last a state Bush plans to visit next Thursday. The ad intersperses clips of a youthful Kerry talking about war atrocities during an appearance before Congress in 1971 with images of veterans condemning his testimony.

The Kerry campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was illegally coordinating its efforts with the Bush-Cheney campaign.

The Kerry campaign cited recent press reports and the group's own statements. The Bush campaign denied the allegation, as did the organization that aired the ad.


SO MANY THINGS TO BE SAID OVER AND OVER

Fareed Zakaria wrote an informative piece about America's oil problems in this week's Newsweek (September 6, 2004, p. 55) It's becoming obvious that the largest pressure for higher oil prices is a "massive increase in demand," he says. "American demand is the gorilla fueling high oil prices—more than instability or the rise of China or anything else. . . the global trade in oil increased by 9.5 billion barrels" between 1990 and 2000, and American demand accounted for half of the increase.

America's insatiable demand for oil is explained quite simply, Zakaria says. "The reason is simple: three letters—SUV. . . . Today they make up 55 percent" of American cars.

When I see an SUV with an American flag, a dove, or some patriotic slogan applied to it, I just laugh. How many more times will these sentiments have to appear on this blog? Who knows? Almost a thousand men and women have died for these SUVs. How many more must follow?
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"The minute we want to be something, we are no longer free." —J. Krishnamurti

COMPLIMENTING A COUPLE OF GREAT EDITORIALS

I wrote the following letter to compliment the Spokesman Review's editorial board yesterday after they wrote a couple of nice editorials about how out of hand the election nonsense has been getting. Later I realized this is a sort of pocket summary of my view of consciousness and its relation to reality in the Universe. Also I realized that Buddhism has been dealing with the unreality of the supposedly real world for thousands of years. If only they'd remove all references to "spiritual" principles, we'd have a religion for the modern age.

Dear Editorial Board,

I thank you for your fine editorials in today’s paper (September 2, 2004), specially the lead one which deals with our nasty evolutionary and animal penchant for self interest above all else. Unfortunately, as far into the future as my mind can imagine, I see no hope for the human animal on that head, and this is why:

Even though Dostoevsky’s protagonist in Notes From the Underground cries out “. . . that to be too conscious is an illness. . . ,” I think the matter is entirely the opposite. If anything, most of humankind is still too unconscious. Let me tell you about an experiment that points up two pretty unsettling conclusions about the human condition.

Some unfortunate humans suffer from seizures so frequent and severe that no medication or treatment can relieve their pain and mental anguish. The only relief these people found was in having their corpus callosums severed, thus separating their left hemispheres from their right. Two things came to light when scientists studied these people after their operations. (I don’t know the source for the original experimental data, but I came across the experiment in books by Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, two highly regarded researches and philosophers in the area of consciousness. Pinker was in Time’s 100 most influential people list last year.)

The first surprise is that there is no evidence of a single unifying soul inside the human body. Two distinct personalities, unaware of the other, became present in the person. Each hemisphere was capable of functioning and taking care of itself without need for the other. Two people now inhabited one body. Either no soul exists or some supernatural act sent in a second soul to one of the halves of the severed brain. The second finding has more to do with your generous and hopeful essay.

Researches found that they could give orders to the right brain which that body would carry out while the left brain (or other person) had to go along with the activity. For example, they’d tell the right brain to get up and walk, keeping the left brain out of the loop, and, later, they’d ask the left brain why it had just gotten up and walked. Researchers quickly discovered that the person “in” the left hemisphere had a strange habit of making up a reason for the action it had been involved in. When asked, the left brain would say, “I went to get a Coke.” Note, it won’t say, “I don’t know why I got up and walked” or “I’ve been part of these experiments for years now, and I often find myself doing things I can’t explain.” No, the left brain is, as Stephen Pinker says, a “spinmeister”; it invariably makes excuses or makes up reasons for the activity it observes in itself. In short, the left brain can justify any behavior or thought the brain can think. The left brain’s chief function is to make sense of the universe it experiences.

I first noticed this ambiguity in myself when I was a young man, arguing Catholic philosophy at the University of Dayton with the brothers. I soon observed that my mind would justify (rationalize) any act or belief I liked. Generalizing from that insight, I eventually came to know that our emotions or our animal instincts are still in control and that almost all human thoughts are mental gymnastics by our left hemispheres to justify anything our animal emotions and instincts want to feel and act on unless fear intervenes. In those awarenesses were the roots of my current existentialism which displays, according to Walter Kaufmann in Existentialism: from Dostoevsky to Sartre, a “. . . repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever.”

At first, this loss of old, comfortable rationalizations about existence is scary and depressing, but later, after years of growing old with it, I now recognize such complete consciousness of one’s epistemological dilemma as the only source of true human freedom. So when we observe people believing all these outrageous political charges about politicians they fear or love, we can recognize the old “spinmeister’ at work, justifying to ourselves our fears, our loves, protecting with irrationality our most precious beliefs, our deepest instincts, our animal selves.

None of us can truly divorce ourselves from this mental quirk. All we can do is become aware of how absolutely relative most of anything we believe is. We must all become more agnostic than most of us are. As an atheist, let me tell you, when I look around me at this irrational world where people believe in nonexistent beings like ghosts and angels, in astrology, in holistic medicines, in luck, in omens, in gods and demons and all sorts of made up explanations for what is going on around and inside them, I can scare myself pretty good, specially when I realize that these same irrational beings also control mighty weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, we should not expect everyone to give up their favorite beliefs right away, but we should ask only that they accept the fact that their beliefs are things made up by the left hemisphere in order to explain and make sense of the data arriving from the scary reality outside the body itself. Take everything with this grain of salt and no cause could rise to sufficient enough pitch to create war ever again.

Thank you again for your editorials today, and sorry this is longer than I wanted it to be,

Geo

PS: Doug Floyd, by the way, this experiment, and the considerations about the human condition which come out of it, is another example of the information and implications that a responsible newspaper should be introducing to its readership. Think how many people are still operating out of false, completely unscientific beliefs which are more than 2000 years out of date. They’re living in a entirely different, outmoded and unrealistic world than modern humans live in, yet they influence the future for all of us.
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George Thomas

INCREASING POVERTY? WHERE?

Among the lies we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration (this time concerning American health care), I came across some more information about poverty which I’m sure the Bush people don’t want to be part of the presidential debates.

First, a little exposure of the lies: “Health experts inside and out of the Bush administration say many of the assertions Bush makes about his first-term health care record and his health proposals for a second term are exaggerated, incomplete or contrary to widely accepted analyses.

“On the campaign trail, the president trumpets last year's enactment of a Medicare prescription drug package as his signature health achievement.

“ ‘Leaders in both political parties had promised prescription drug coverage for years.’ Bush said last month. ‘We got it done. More than 4 million seniors have signed up for drug discount cards that provide real savings.’

“Left unsaid is that 2.9 million of them had no choice – they were enrolled automatically. And full implementation of the drug benefits will not occur until 2006.

“Since Bush took office, the number of Americans without health insurance has climbed by 4 million to nearly 44 million.”

Enough said? The biggest lie, to me, in this Bush fluff, is his claim that more Americans are covered by government health programs since he took office as if it’s due to his compassion. The truth is that “... total enrollment in the two government health programs has risen during Bush's tenure by about 7.5 million. But for the vast majority, coverage was required by law, not the result of any policy change:

" ‘Part of the reason more people were covered is the economy got so bad that people lost income,’ Rowland said. ‘There were more low-income people under Bush than previously, so they became eligible for public programs.’ "

That’s right! Bush’s economy is so bad that more people live in poverty and qualify for government programs; then, he has the balls to claim that his programs now cover more people than before he was anointed to power. You can read more by looking up this story by Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post, August 23, 2004


HERE’S SOME MORE TRUTH ABOUT KERRY

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago Tribune editor who was on the Vietnam mission for which John Kerry received the Silver Star is backing up Kerry's account of the incident.

William Rood, a night city editor for the Chicago Tribune, served with John Kerry during the Vietnam War.

William Rood, 61, said he decided to break his silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission because reports by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are incorrect and darken the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry, according to a report in the Tribune's Sunday editions.

Rood, an editor on the Tribune's metropolitan desk, said the allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were overblown are untrue. Kerry came up with an attack strategy that was praised by their superiors, Rood said.

"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us," Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in the newspaper. "It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there."

According to the Tribune, Rood's recollection of what happened that day in South Vietnam was backed by military documents, including his citation for a Bronze Star and a report written by then-Capt. Roy Hoffmann, who commanded his and Kerry's task force and is now a critic of the Democratic candidate.

The mission has become a focal point of a political and media firestorm fueled by the Swift Boat Veterans.

One of the group's leaders, John O'Neill, succeeded Kerry in command of a swift boat. O'Neill is co-author of the book Unfit for Command, which accuses Kerry of lying about his wartime record and betraying comrades when he returned from Vietnam by alleging widespread atrocities by U.S. troops. The Swift Boat Veterans have repeated the accusations in TV ads.

The Kerry campaign filed a complaint Friday with the Federal Election Commission, alleging the Swift Boat Veterans are coordinating their ads with the Bush campaign. The Bush campaign has denied the claim but refused to condemn the book or the group's TV ads.

Rood wrote that Kerry recently contacted him and other crew members, requesting that they go public with their accounts of what happened that February day.

"I can't pretend those calls (from Kerry) had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this," Rood said. "What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it."

Rood declined requests from a Tribune reporter to be interviewed. The Tribune's deputy managing editor for news, George de Lama, told The Associated Press on Saturday that Rood would not publicly discuss the issue.

When the Tribune asked O'Neill for his response to Rood's account, O'Neill argued that the former swift boat skipper's version of events is not substantially different from what appeared in his book.

A message left with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was not immediately returned Saturday.
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"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."
—Biologist P. B. Medawar

William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
August 24, 2004

KERRY ASKS BUSH TO END SWIFT BOAT LIES

At a fund-raiser attended by about 750 people, Kerry said the attacks by a group of Vietnam veterans and former Swift Boat commanders have intensified "because in the last months they have seen me climbing in America's understanding that I know how to fight a smarter and more effective war" against terrorists.

"That's why they're attacking my credibility. That's why they've personally gone after me. The president needs to stand up and stop that. The president needs to have the courage to talk about it."

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group funded in part by a top GOP donor in Texas, has been running ads featuring veterans who served in Vietnam at the same time as Kerry and question his wartime record.

Group leader John O'Neill continued the attack Sunday on ABC's This Week show, saying that Kerry did not deserve his bravery medals because the swift boat under Kerry's command fled up river during an assault.

Kerry backer John Podesta fired back on the show, saying, " It’s lie and deny, the story keeps changing and changing…John Kerry served with distinction in Vietnam."

The White House and the Bush campaign have denied any direct connection with the Swift Boat group. "The president has made it repeatedly clear that he wants to see an end to all" advertising from outside groups, said Brian Jones, a Bush campaign spokesman.

But on Saturday, a former POW, retired Col. Ken Cordier, resigned as a volunteer from the Bush campaign's veterans' steering committee after it was learned that he participated in an anti-Kerry ad sponsored by the Swift Boat group. The ad criticizes Kerry's congressional anti-war testimony in the 1970s alleging U.S. troops engaged in atrocities in Vietnam.

"Col. Cordier did not inform the campaign of his involvement in the advertisement," the Bush campaign said in a statement. "Because of his involvement (with the group) Col. Cordier will no longer participate as a volunteer for Bush-Cheney '04."

Earlier on Saturday, Kerry's campaign released a video comparing the controversy over Kerry's Vietnam service to attacks on John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries.

The video, sent via e-mail to supporters, says, "George Bush is up to his old tricks" and shows then-Texas Gov. Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain at a debate in February 2000.

McCain, sitting next to Bush, says that when "fringe veterans groups" attacked him at a Bush campaign function, Bush stood by and didn't say a word. McCain says a group of senators wrote Bush a letter that said: "Apologize. You should be ashamed."

McCain, also a Vietnam veteran, says Bush "really went over the line."

"I don't know how you can understand this, George, but that really hurts," McCain says.

The Swift Boat group also was being challenged by a Chicago Tribune editor who was on the Feb. 28, 1969, mission for which Kerry received the Silver Star. William Rood, 61, said he decided to break his silence about the mission because recent reports of Kerry's actions in that battle are incorrect and darken the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry.

"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us," Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in Sunday's edition of the Tribune. "It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there."

Rood said the allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were overblown are untrue and that Kerry came up with an attack strategy that was praised by their superiors. According to the Tribune, Rood's recollection of what happened that day in South Vietnam was backed by military documents.

Rood wrote that Kerry recently contacted him and other crew members, requesting that they go public with their accounts of what happened.

"I can't pretend those calls (from Kerry) had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this," Rood said. "What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it."

Kerry also picked up support from Wayne Langhofer, who told The Washington Post he was manning a machine gun in a boat behind Kerry's and saw firing from both banks of a river as Kerry dived in to rescue Special Forces soldier James Rassmann, the basis for Kerry's Bronze Star.

Until now, the Post noted on its Web site, Kerry's version of acting under fire had come from crewmen on his own boat. It quoted Langhofer as saying he was approached by leaders of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth several months ago but declined to join them in speaking against Kerry.

In Roanoke, Va., on Saturday, Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards also called on Bush to end the Swift Boat Veterans ads.

"This is a moment of truth for George W. Bush," Edwards said at a Democratic rally. "We're going to see what kind of man he is and what kind of leader he is. ... We want to hear three words: Stop these ads."
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Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


RESARCH SUGGESTS LANGUAGE HAS A BEARING ON COGNITION

David Brown
Washington Post
August 24, 2004

"Does language sometimes define the content of thought? Are there people who cannot entertain certain ideas because their language does not have the words to express them? Are there concepts that cannot be translated into some languages?

"These questions have vexed linguists and neuroscientists for years. The general feeling has been that language does not limit cognition. However, a new study in the online version of Science suggests that the prevailing notion might not be correct.

"Peter Gordon, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University, conducted an unusual set of experiments with seven adults of the 200-member Piraha tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil.

"The tribe's counting system consists of three words – one that means 'roughly one,' one that means 'a small quantity' and one that means 'many.'

"Gordon asked the Piraha subjects to perform various tasks in which performance would be greatly enhanced by the ability to count. These included laying out the same number of nuts or sticks that he had laid out; distinguishing two boxes whose only difference was the number of fish drawn on their tops; and knowing when a tin can was empty after watching the researcher put nuts into the can and then withdraw them.

"Gordon found the Piraha were incapable of following or accounting for more than three objects. He attributed this finding to the fact the Piraha 'have no privileged name for the singular quantity'– in other words, no one, no notion of an integer."

I believe several times on this Blog site, I've mentioned that Christians who are Bible literalists don't have the language for the modern world nor for science, that they live in a world 2,000 years out of date. That's why they are so angry and uncomfortable with the world they find their out of date language trying to cope with. This bit of information further confirms it.
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"My atheism. . . is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests." —George Santayana (Philosopher)

NO! FREE WILL DOES NOT EXIST!

Contrary to Dennett’s brilliant ratiocination about choice and free will, I still come down on the side that I am pretty much a robot. Dennett opens Chapter 8 with some serious considerations by scholars who also doubt that we human animals have free will. He even quotes himself:

“... those same decisions can also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival.”

Now isn’t that true, if we are honest with ourselves? Do we recall the moments of decision or the moments we are aware we've made the decisions?

Dennett quote’s Derk Pereboom’s book, “Living Without Free Will” (2001) in which Pereboom defends the view that “given our best scientific theories, factors beyond our control ultimately produce all of our actions, and we are, therefore, not morally responsible for them.”

Libet, the man who discovered and measured RP writes, “The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act.” (Libet 1999, p. 49) The argument for determinism traces back to Libet’s discovering and measuring “preconscious cognition” or the readiness potential, a measurable gap which exists between a decision and our conscious awareness of the decision which very strongly suggests a “moral void”. “When you think you’re deciding, you’re actually just passively watching a sort of delayed internal videotape, (the ominous 300-millisecond delay) of the real deciding that happened unconsciously in your brain quite a while before ‘it occurred to you’ to [act],” Libet writes.


MORAL DECAY? OR POVERTY? IS THERE A CHOICE?

Choice seems really important in the following matter. Conservatives love to blame America’s ills on the fact we don’t go to the Bible for our 3rd and nine plays, but couldn’t the wildness of some of our children also result from the increase in the numbers of those living below the poverty line in modern America?

In a report from Bush’s home state, “Counselors in Fort Worth and Arlington schools say today's kindergartners are experiencing more emotional and behavioral problems than their counterparts five years ago, according to a survey released in February. Several area educators contacted for this report expressed the same sentiment.

“More students are violent, lack discipline and show no respect for authority, according to the survey by the Partnership for Children and the Mental Health Connection of Tarrant County, Texas.

“The survey blamed the problems on issues including fractured families, a lack of structure for children and a growing incivility in public discourse.”

All well and good, but if we read further, we find a troubling fact: “The problem is widespread. National studies show that about 10 percent of preschool and young school-age children behave aggressively and that 25 percent of young, economically disadvantaged children do so.”

There it is—“economically disadvantaged children”! Can we use the word “poverty” to describe the situation at the bottom of our culture caused by Republican economic policies that favor the rich and harm the poor so that work is losing it’s meaning and it’s worth? Further, what if it’s true that some of us have little choice about how we’ll act after poverty conditions us to certain behaviors?

We truly need to sort out the chaff from the wheat on this one, for how can we doubly punish those who really can’t control their reactions to deterministic brain functions? What if poverty is determined by forces beyond a person’s control? Will we continue to blame them? If we blame someone for something he has no control over, then punishment is a futile way to alter behavior and a silly exercise in the first place. Could there be better ways of achieving good results?

Report by Cynthia L. Garza, Knight Ridder August 23, 2004 in our Spokesman Review.
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"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped." —Groucho Marx

ALL I CAN DO IS PASS ON THE FACTS: KERRY EARNED HIS SILVER STAR

William B. Rood was there and puts an end to speculation about what did – and did not – happen.

"There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago – with three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.

"One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened then. I am the other.

"For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election, with a group of swift-boat veterans and others contending Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.

"Many of us wanted to put it all behind us – the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service – even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.

"But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have claimed that the accounts of what happened are overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.

"Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days, Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.

"I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and never talk publicly about it again.

"I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.

"On Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats – the others were Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43 – that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a U.S. Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep.

"The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats – each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesel engines and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear – was no secret.

"Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

"The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boat crews usually did to an ambush.

"We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.

"The Viet Cong had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and sending troops to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, the enemy was long gone by the time the troops got there.

"The first time we took fire – from the usual rockets and automatic weapons – Kerry ordered "turn 90," and the three boats roared in on the ambushers. It worked. We routed the attackers, killing three of them. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed a half dozen more Viet Cong, wounded or captured others and found weapons and supplies used to stage ambushes.

"Meanwhile, Kerry ordered my boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.

"It happened again – another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the "turn 90" maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 rocket launcher pointed at the boats. But it wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.

"We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a Viet Cong fighter behind a hooch – a thatched hut – maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site.

"Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.

"With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.

"Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he had chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

"John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the Viet Cong usually wore.

"The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There also was firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and, at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.

"Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.

"Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boat crews, saying that the tactic of charging the attackers was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."

"Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boat crews did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a fault.

"However, our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.

"It also was well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam.

"Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a Viet Cong tax collector was operating upstream.

"Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the Viet Cong, pursuing and killing several.

"Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swift boats, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.

"The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics such as Bernique's were encouraged.

"What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.

"Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.

"My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used, saying the Viet Cong were "caught completely off guard."

"There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents often were drawn up in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers.

"It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago – not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.

"But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they intend to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.

"Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank; Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat; and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing fire from the opposite bank.

"Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.

"The survivors of all these events are scattered across the United States now.

"Jerry Leeds lives in a Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.

"Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.

"With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time."

William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
August 24, 2004
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With all this information (and more to come in other posts), we must ask why our Spokesman Review newspaper chose to "front page" reports which have the effect of making the lies by men who did not serve with John Kerry seem equal to the facts. A good job of reporting would help to serve the truth and point up all the lies which are coming out of these liars and also their personal craziness. I must question the Spokesman's Republican leanings when one of its editors admitted that the Spokesman has already made up its collective mind to endorse the lies of George Bush.

SOAKING WET HEAD

As Doug MacArthur once said, "I have returned," or was that Jack Nicholson who said, "Here's Johnny!" that I'm thinking of? Anyhow, after soaking my head a few days at Ainsworth Hot Springs, me and my spouse are returned to the fray, rather the less frayed for wear and tear after a good soaking. Now, back to it, "out with my sword and to work withall!"

TROOP REALIGNMENT FITS CONSERVATIVE BIAS

Bushman Cheney’s conservative idea to realign American troops from Western to Eastern Europe makes sense to conservatives no doubt because they better understand the more primitive governments of Eastern Europe. Conservatives are comfortable there, and those nations are more likely to be their allies against Western Europe’s progressive mind sets which they still equate with communist leadership. Those nations most recently freed from dictatorial regimes will still be sympathetic to dictatorial and authoritarian mentalities in ways even they don’t understand. Look at how the Russian people threw over church and czarist authority only to accept Stalin’s authority. They’ll be quite comfortable with Bush’s authoritarian mentality.

Cheney’s rabid attack on governments which still feel responsible for their citizens’ welfare and which are still controlled a great deal by worker’s unions reflects his fear of nations which put their citizens ahead of their corporations. Such liberal governments are a threat to the authoritarian mentality of the bushmen whose only goal is an increase in the power of money over the needs of the citizens. This battle may be as important in the history of the globe as the battle against fascism of another sort was in the 20th century.


BOOKS KILL?

Newsweek’s “Taking Depression On” (about college student depression), in the August 23, 2004 issue (p. 59) reminds me vaguely of a segment in an ancient Saturday Review which discussed student depression long ago.

In the first place, maybe book reading is itself a depression causing activity because it has so little to do with the hunter gatherer mentality we’re still chained to. To a hunter/gatherer, sitting still, reading a book, might have been an unbearable restraint on freedom of activity and movement. All of us, even daily readers, can recall times when to sit still and read is almost maddening. I recall stories of non-modern people cracking up when confronted with modern civilization.

That long ago Review article mentioned the difficulty of coming into college and actually being asked to read hundreds of pages of homework, and, even more importantly, suddenly confronting uncomfortable ideas which are taboo in high school. Imagine! Being asked to consider that perhaps there’s no free will in the world or that religions go way back into prehistory and that each is a passing fad and each is no more relevant or true than another? Imagine learning that Popes are corrupt, that Abraham did not exist and is probably an heroic creation like the Greek epic heroes, meant to represent a tribe or city state?

Of course, if your parents and school system protected you from these facts, you’d be pretty depressed too, and suicidal, to find out that fairies and angels really don’t exist. It’s a shock that each of us must go through if we’re to really become grown up persons and sophisticated thinkers rather than blind followers of ideas really not our own, things fed to us with our fairy tales at bedtime. Yep! Growing up’s tough!


FREE WILL OOMPH!

If we are truly self-seeking, deterministic animals how do altruistic behaviors arise in such a way as to allow us to cooperate in larger social units? Evolutionary scientists are certainly measuring away to come up with explanations for free will mechanisms in the human animal. Many just believe we’re completely determined, that no free will exists.

First, let’s come up with an interesting finding with which to motivate us to try to be better altruists: “Altruists. . . do appear to do better economically: the experimental studies consistently find that altruistic behavior is positively correlated with socioeconomic status.” (Robert Frank’s, Passions Within Reason, p. 235.)

Can we tell if people are being “good”? “. . . Frank showed that people are surprisingly good—though far from perfect: between 60 and 75 percent accurate—at predicting who will [cheat] and who will cooperate.” (pp. 215-216)

Now back to Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves”: “Where does the oomph come from to overrule our own instincts? Tradition would say it comes from some psychic force called willpower, but this just names the phenomena and postpones explanation. How is ‘willpower’ implemented in our brains? According to Ainslie, we get it from a competitive situation in which ‘interests’ engage in what he calls ‘intertemporal bargaining.’ These ‘interests’ are temporary agents of sorts, homunculi representing various reward possibilities.”

I only intend to peak your interest with these paragraphs. Dennett’s arguments are subtle and lengthy, not easy for me to recap. (Specially today when I’ve got a slight sinus headache numbing my thoughts.) But, if we study the process of building a brain with altruistic wiring in it, Dennett finds that the processes of evolution are perfectly able to find a way to make it happen: “. . . if you want to get to genuine altruism, you should consider trying the evolutionary approach, sneaking up on it by gradual increments, with no Prime Mammals, and no skyhooks, passing from blind selfishness through psuedo-altruism to quasi-altruism (benselfishness) to something that may be quite good enough for all of us.” (p. 217)

SITE SHUTDOWN

This site will shut down for a few days while I go soak my head, as in what my more polite conservative friends yell at me, "O go soak your head!" Ha, ha, though, on them, for it will be in Ainsworth hot springs in O Canada where the soaking will take place.

I hope they don't shoot Americans up there. I'm thinking of making up a bumper sticker that reads, "Yes, me too. I hate George Bush and everything he stands for!" But that's too long, damn it!
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THINK ABOUT THIS!

"I have read your book and much like it." —Moses Hadas (1900-1966)