What the War Costs

What the War Costs

MIT Admissions

Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned after admitting that she fabricated her academic credentials. In a recent book, Ms. Jones warns stressed-out students competing for admission to elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. It is, of course, more than a bit ironic that given her lack of even a baccalurate degree, no academic institution would have considered Jones for her present job.

Yesterday, my youngest son competed in a district-wide math competition for the gifted, in which he placed sixth. My buttons were popping when I saw Our Boy collect his medal and also a third-place trophy for the school's team. But I perceived that he may have been disappointed that he didn't do better, given his strong drive to excel. I asked him about that, and it turns out that he was happy where he was and I was happy where he was in the rankings.

I'm not unsympathetic to the thrust of Jones' desire to reduce student and parental anxiety over academic performance. On the other hand, as her own experience shows, it is false to say that grades, scores, and degrees don't matter. They do matter, as they open doors to future opportunities that would otherwise be closed.

I tell my boys that I ask only one thing: that they do their very best. If their very best is an average grade, that's fine to me. On the other hand, they also realize that in many respects they are not average and thusly they need to make the corrsponding effort. Both of them now get top grades and, more importantly to me, their motivation in getting those grades is inner-driven and reflects a genuine love of learning for its own sake.

Cats and Spirituality

Why is it that cats are associated with spirituality going back to the days of the Egyptian pharoahs?

There is an endearing story of the prophet Mohammed cutting off his sleave to allow his cat to continue to slumber. Throughout southeast Asia, there are temples dedicated to cats. The present pope is well-known for his love of cats as are the wiccans. Great humanitarians who loved cats include Albert Schweitzer, Florence Nightingale, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Vanna White. (Well, Vanna does like cats and she's probably a nice person.)

I cannot think of any evil people who liked cats.

To generalize, I think it has something to do with their mellowness, independence, fidility, and tranquillity and their capacity to evoke in others mellowness, independence, fidility, and tranquillity while still retaining an air of mystery and divinity.

Someone sent me this post.

I was just in a funky music store the other day and saw a bumper sticker that said:

"I don't need a Higher Power. I have a Cat."

As a fairly spiritual person, it made me chuckle, as cats are natural companions when engaging in spiritual activities, like meditating, praying, reading sacred texts, etc. Maybe they feel a connection... maybe they just like it when their person is quiet and attentive and it's a good opportunity to schmooze some snuggling, or simply enjoy quiet time together. Maybe it's because sometimes they act like Higher Powers patiently trying to teach us lesser beings what life is really all about. :)

Heck, I can't even do yoga without them playing with the drawstrings on my pants or climbing on my back. Although I'm skeptical about there being a spiritual connection there- I believe they just think it's funny!

Help Me

I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.In terms of payment: I don't have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3' above sea level.

Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.

Thank You,

projectile

Poodle Sheep

Flocks of sheep were imported to Japan and then sold by a company called Poodles as Pets, marketed as fashionable accessories, available at $1,600 each.

The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

My skeptical apprentice, this story is but an urban legend.

Bush Dancing

Mercy

Means and Ends

We sometimes hear formulations of the Iraq war that go like this: "Although the war has been poorly executed, it is a noble cause. " On Jonestown memorial sites, we see often the same kind of sentiment. While it is true that the experiment ended in disaster, defenders say, the followers of Jones were aspiring to ideals of classlessness and racial harmony.

Do the ends justify the means? Sometimes? Always? Never? Or is this statement meaningless?

My view: There are only means. An end that is defined as an abstraction as it almost always is makes such a cliche worthless.

Take for example civil liberties and national security and the proposition that civil liberties should be constrained to enhance national security-- a means to an end. That may be an applause line for certain audiences. But I would say that the entire sentence not only has no meaning but is dangerous until we know exactly who liberties are on the line and for what compelling reason thay must so be.

A good example of the catastrophic disconnect between means and ends (or what can be called application and principle) is the resolution to go to war in Iraq.
The authorization for the present conflict is section three of the Congressional Resolution on Iraq:

(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

These fuzzy statements are the legal basis for our involvement in Iraq that has resulted in so much bloodshed, the draining our of national treasury, and the erosion of US influence and prestige.

A coherent means cannot exist in the absence of a concrete and defined end.

Perhaps the proposition turns on the word justify, meaning in this context, a rational and proportionate relationship between a goal and the means whereby that goal is achieved. We don't spank a crying baby with a hatchet, for example. Of course, questions of national policy derive from this, i.e. Atomizing Hioshima --> defeat of Japan; or liberalizing abortion laws --> reduced juvenile delinquency. The policy question is of course whether these causalities really exist and even if they do exist whether they they are the best or only means to achieve those goals. Evil, it has been said, is the shadow cast by good. Or, to invoke another platitude, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Thus, it often happens that even when the goal and the means is presumed to be good and may even be good, the outcomes are nevertheless tragically evil.

Selling the War

(CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller) To hear Bill Moyers tell it last evening on his PBS program “Buying The War," the White House press corps was a willing participant in its own deception about the President’s case for war in Iraq. He portrays us as easily-manipulated stooges on bended-knee to the President and his top aides. Moyers charges in his opening sentences that the press “largely surrendered its independence and skepticism” and joined with the Bush Administration in marching to war. To portray reporters as mindless conduits of White House policies is unfounded. To charge that the White House press was “compliant” and cheered the President’s arguments for war plainly misrepresents the facts.

Noller is wrong. The White House press specifically and the press in general were compliant, credulous stooges. The orchestration of the mass media was both impressive and duplicitious. There are news reports that the former CIA Directory George Tenet said that his phrase "slam dunk" that many people took as a green light to invade Iraq was actually a reference to effectively propaganderizing the war. Frankly, I don't know which interpretation is worse.

As Moyers showed in his documentary, the process the administration used to sell the Iraq war and arouse public support was as follows:

1. Pass to reporters false "evidence" in leading liberal publications, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
2. Cite that evidence in the Sunday talk shows.
3. Weave that evidence into a dog and pony show for Congressional leaders and the United Nations.
4. Use simple powerful images such as a mushroom cloud in all speeches.
5. Rhetorically associate at every opportunity in every speech Iraq with 9/11.
6. Co-opt the most influential reporters and columnists with private briefings, parties, and requests for advice.
7. Ruthlessly crush dissent in the intelligence services and the military.
8. Demonize or trivialize the skeptical.
9. Make it mainstream by enlisting actors and other famous people to spread the word.
10. Keep the message simple ("Iraq has WMDS") and repeat it continually, making the decision for war a foregone and popular conclusion. (The administration spin today is just as simplistic, but I don't think the public are now buying what the administration is selling: "If we don't stay, there will be genocide." )

In some hellish pit, Joseph Goebbels is smiling.

What is the antidote for simpletons like Noller?

1. Get away from the New York - Washinton, D.C. fishbowl, if not physically, at least mentally. David Halberstam, who died last week, wrote an influential book in 1972 The Best and the Brightest, an ironic reference to the intellectuals that led us into the Viet Nam quagmire. In it he refers to the incestuous relationship between press and power. I think the only way to look at the big questions clearly is to separate yourself from those people. The invitation to Georgetown parties, Lincoln Center concert, and White House briefings erodes the tough-mindedness needed to separate lies from truth.

2. Do your homework. The newsprint as well as the cable and web media are basically trascriptionists and there is nothing that flagship media outlets like more than to transcribe the words of the powerful. But it isn't from the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense where you will get the truth. It's from the mid-level bureaucrats and majors. Propaganda is a bottom down process. The agonizing search for truth is a ground up process.

3. Grow a backbone. This is true for everyone-- the media, the legislature, and voters. In photographs of people the start of war-- it doesn't matter if it's WWI or WWII and it doesn't matter if it's Germany or America-- there is a commonality in expression in the crowds. It's the faces of ignorant glee. But war has a way of teaching us reality-- slowly and painfully. And it is for this reason that courageous questioning is the highest patriotism.

Bill O'Reilly Freaks Out

Here is a partial transcript from Faux News wherein Bill Moyer's got O'Reilly's Irish up for stating in his PBS special Selling the War the obvious-- that O'Reilly is the Joseph Goebbels of the Bush administration.

And that's a memo.

JANE HALL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: First of all, Bill, you know, I think you could say he should have said where you said I don't want to demonize anybody. But then you proceeded to demonize people. This technique is used by a lot of people on this network and a lot of other places. I think the documentary was excellent. I've reported and written about this. I've interviewed the reporters from Knight-Ridder newspapers who were among the few people who got this right, which is one of the things he says.
He goes after the "New York Times." The "New York Times" didn't even review this.
O'REILLY: Jane, all right, look, so you're telling me as a professor.
HALL: It is a solid piece of journalism.
O'REILLY: Jane, you're telling me as a professor of journalism.
HALL: Let me finish.
O'REILLY: No. I'm not going to let you finish. Are you telling me as professor of journalism that the cut Moyers put on national television of my remarks was fair? Are you telling me that?
HALL: Let me just say.
O'REILLY: Are you telling me that Jane? Yes or no?
HALL: Can I answer the question?
O'REILLY: Because you can bloviate all night and it does us no good. Yes or no, Jane?
HALL: I would have put more of the quote in there. But you are not a huge piece of this. This is more about the print press.
O'REILLY: It doesn't matter what I am. I don't have access to what else he did, as Bernie pointed out.
HALL: Wait. The reporting that I've done, that I know about, that I've independently reported.
O'REILLY: You are justifying the unjustifiable again.
HALL: I don't agree with you about that. He is right about...
O'REILLY: You don't agree before your own eyes, before your own eyes you see how dishonest that cut was and you don't agree. Come on.
HALL: How many times has Fox News taken half of...
O'REILLY: You don't justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior. That's not what you do.
HALL: I think you are taking one small thing which obviously affects you. That's different...
O'REILLY: Small to you madam because you weren't made to be a war monger dishonest guy. I was. So it's small to you but isn't small to me.
HALL: I didn't say — I said I wouldn't have made that cut.
O'REILLY: I disagree with you. I have never disagreed with you more than tonight.
HALL: Well OK. You can disagree with me.
O'REILLY: This is a shameful analysis.
HALL: No, I disagree with you.

Rosie Walks

The departure of Rosie from the View was, she claimed, because of a contract disagreement. Maybe. I think it is also true that her public was starting to weary of Rosie's vulgarity. She reminds me of another actress now living in the small town of Oblivion-- Rosanna. Both have a coarseness that they thought played to their supposed regular-folks audience. But what they were both doing was playing to their real audience-- the Hollyweird elite.

Transubstantiation

In a discussion about the cult leader Jim Jones, I had a throw-away thought on the meaning of the sacrement of communion. I got some interestings reponses.

Transubstantiation, or the doctrine of the 'real presence' in the Holy Eucharist, is one of the dividing points between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, who explicitly rejected it in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith. There is no claim on the part of the Romans that any physical changes in the bread and wine are detectable, in fact, the claim is that they could not possibly be. It is then a doctrine for which there is no evidence, only an interpretation of scripture, which cannot be verified. During the Oxford Movement Hurrell Froude questioned John Keble, who as the author of the immensely popular book of sentimental verse, The Christian Year, had written for the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes Day)

O come to our Communion Feast:
There present in the heart,
Not in the hands, th'eternal Priest
Will His true self impart.

Froude asked how he could be certain of the word "not" at the beginning of the third line, but Keble retained the verse as he wrote it— until he heard it had been quoted by a bishop he disliked. Thirty years after Froude's early demise, on his own death bed, Keble asked that "not" be replaced with "and" in Froude's memory, and it has been printed "and" ever since.

Yes, the particular article in question reads: "Transubstantiation (or the change of the susbtance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lod, cannot be proived by Holy Write; but is repugnant to the lain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrement, and has given occasion to many superstitions."

My objection comes down to my view that truth propositions must be placed into the subjunctive-- if it can be proved, it must be proved; conversely, if it cannot be proved or disproved, it cannot be rejected. Thus, I can accept as an article of faith that angels exist. But, if you say that angels are on my roof, I better hear the flapping of celestial wings before I believe. I will be happy to accept a person's faith but not to the extent that that faith conflicts with normal experiences-- in this case wine being really God's blood.

Few things outside mathematics can be proved or disproved in the sense of absolute certainty. In many legal contexts the preponderance of evidence is enough to settle an issue. So first it would be wise to reduce the requirement to a substantial accumulation of evidence. Still, should we say of propositions for which there can be no possible evidence for or against that they cannot be rejected? Perhaps that makes some logical sense—namely that we cannot declare them true or false—but as a practical matter, it could force consideration of a host of propositions that are meaningless, insignificant, or problematic.

Maybe the word "prove" should be removed from argumentation altogether for the reason that you suggest. It is possible that the question of whether or not the wine is the blood of Christ falls into what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the silent category: "Whereof on cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent" as it is neither true or false by definition nor emperically verifiable making it to use your statement "meaningless, insignificant, or problematic." The logical positivist premise of this closes down of course entire areas of potential understanding that embrace the realm of values, paradox, contradiction, mysticism, and non-Aristotelian thinking. Because some of life's most delightful experiences fall into this category, I think it's a mistake to embrace the narrow epistimology of the strict empericist, so long as we balance it with rigorous independent thinking and awareness. Otherwise, the alternative may well be the madness of those who sipped from the Jonestown joy juice tub.

Many people misinterpret the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, as it uses terms that have changed in meaning over time. But to dismiss the Sacraments as ineffectual and/or inconsequential is to remove oneself from Christian theology, tradition and practice, IMHO.

"The theory of transubstantiation was never made official in the medieval church, but got weighty backing even before Aquinas’ time when it was used in documents of the Lateran Council of the Church in 1215. It was based on Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of existence. Aristotle divided the being of a particular object into substance and accidents. Take a sheep, for instance: its substance, which is its reality, its participation in the universal quality of being a sheep, is manifested in its gambolling on the hills, munching grass and baaing. Its accidents are things particular to the individual sheep at which we are looking: the statistics of its weight, the curliness of its wool, or the timbre of its baa. When the sheep dies, it ceases to gambol on the hills, munch grass and baa: its substance, its ‘sheepiness’, is instantly extinguished, and only the accidents remain – its corpse, including its weight, curly wool or voice box – and they will gradually decay. They are not significant to its former sheepiness, which has ended with the extinguishing of its substance in death. It is no longer a sheep.
. . .
In the Mass, substance changes, accidents do not – why should they? They are not significant for being. Through the grace of God, the substance of bread is replaced by the substance of the Body of Christ. It is a satisfying and reverent analysis: as long, that is, as one accepts Thomas’ scientific or philosophical premises of the language of substance and accidents, affirming the conception of universal realities which are greater than individual instances, such as the reality of being a sheep or being bread, rather than particular instances of sheep or bread."

MacCulloch, Diarmaid – Reformation [Penguin 2003, pp25-26]

Accepting the division that Aristotle suggested, I still have trouble understanding how the essence of God is somehow the essence of wine-- the non-sheepiness, as it were. Regardless, I'm skeptical about many things including the necessity of the sacraments.

Catholics recognize confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony, and extreme unction as sacraments, in addition to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Many Protestant churches recognize only baptism and the Lord’s Supper (or what my boy calls “that thing you do at church with the blood and flesh”). Some apostolic churches have a third sacraments—holy sealing-- the passing of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands by church elders. But on what authority are there any ordinances? Doesn’t Jesus command us to do much more than just these acts? Because sacraments are done without exception within the context of the institutional church, I believe that the observance of any sacraments is a form of sacerdotalism—an attempt by the clergy to mediate between me and God by imposing on me requirements that have nothing to do with my faith in God. I think we can affirm our faith with baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be an obligation.

That there exists no relation of the faithful to/in the communion of the faithful that is the ecclesia is a very unChristian attitude, IMHO. As is the notion that sacraments are ineffectual and uneccessary.

You may be right on both counts. As a practical matter, however, I see many church goers who believe that their sect is the true church and all others are outside of the ecclesia, as someone from the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) once informed me. As an idealistic matter, I think it would be more positive for people to see oneness in the humanity of other rathers than in the dogmas of others.

The Last Season of The Apprentice

An easy prediction: The Apprentice has aired for the last time. Declining ratings has doomed the show, and there was no mention in the final splash of next season's gala. The Hollywood Bowl finale was 34th place with 7.98 million views and the average was a NBC all time low of 6.24 million. These aren't numbers that advertiser will like.

The firing of the ice queen last year and the introduction of the Donald's pompous and untalented kids Larry, Curly, and Mo to the show sealed the fact the Trump's kingdom is no meritocracy. Picking the botoxed Stefani over James who had won more often only makes sense when we understand that the Trump empire is 98 percent sizzle and two percent steak, where working for General Electric entitles the claim that you own General Electric.

For us lesser mortals, the conclusion of this so-called reality show is a respite to be embraced.

The Partial-Birth Abortion Act

I consider the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act to be correctly decided and trivial. It was correctly decided because I believe legislatures and judges are obliged to draw moral lines in the name of public policy. That line at least to me seems appropriate. Such lines are drawn all the time. The difference between speeding and not speeding is one mile per hour and the difference between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one dollar. I don't buy the argument that the right to abortion opens the door to infanticide-- the so-called slippery slope fallacy. However, based on what I have read on it, it does seem to be a rather appalling procedure.

Having said that, I consider this decision to be trivial. First, it is exceedingly rare. Secondly, in the hypothetical where the mother's life is in peril, I cannot imagine that any jury would convict if the doctor had to choose between the life of the mother and the child and the mother's life was chosen. Thirdly, if the mother's life was not at risk, it is hard for me to believe that a mother would allow the fetus to incubate into the third trimester so it would even be an issue.

Abortion is far more complex than merely making a simplistic dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice positions. (Choosing to abort can be pro-life and choosing not to abort is of course a choice, so such labels are meaningless.) Few doctors endorse abortion as a means of birth control and such a grave step should never be taken lightly. Doctors, perhaps for insurance reasons, sometimes scare the daylights out of mother-to-be about the health of their child. But doctors are sometimes wrong, and it’s important to trust ourselves in such matters.

I’ve also met few absolutists on abortion, especially when they have to deal with the issue personally, as in a hypothetical in which a baby is an encephalic-- without a brain-- and the mother’s life in danger. Someone wrote to me saying that this “did happen to my closest friends a couple of years ago, and even more ironically, at the time, I was teaching an eight week course on Biblical ethics when the severity of her condition came to light. In a nutshell, she had four small kids at home, pregnant with her fifth, when she started having problems. Doctors said that: a) The baby essentially had no brain, his limbs were severely deformed, and other internal organs where malformed beyond hope. b) Because of some uterine problems, there was a very high chance that sometime in the ninth month she would suffer some major hemorrhage that could prove fatal to her. They of course, wanted to abort right away. She refused, and moreover, wanted to carry the baby full term and have a natural childbirth. (Initially, she actually wanted to give birth at home). For me, I saw the ethical question in a whole new light, now that it had a face on it. The baby had a zero percentage chance of surviving. For a staunch pro-lifer, it was a dilemma acknowledging that the right-to-life can't always be seen as an absolute. It didn't seem right that the mother should possibly lose her life, and four small children lose their mother, when the baby wasn't going to live no matter what. Fortunately, the mother decided to have a C-section at the earliest possible time. (32 weeks or something like that...don't exactly remember) She got through it okay. The baby lived for three days or so.”

I might also point out that abortion should not even be a moral issue in a society where young men and women have the self-respect, self-control, and a desire for a good future to exclude promiscuity from their life-- not just before marriage but for their entire life. Moral economy consists of supply and demand. If there was no demand for heroin, there would be no supply of heroin. Likewise, if there was no demand for promiscuity, the demand for abortion would I suspect also decline. So, for me, the biggest question is: why is it that promiscuity remains such a lure to cause so many people to shipwreck their lives and the lives of others?

Jonestown's Holy Communion

Last night, I attended a mass at a local Catholic church. I'm not Catholic, but there is much that I admire in their tradition of morals, education, and charity. When it was time to have communion, those from the church-- mainly middle school kids-- lined up to take a wafer and sip from a brass globlet of wine, bowing first and then returning to their seats to kneel.

The priest assured us that the wine was "actually" the blood of Jesus. My background is low Baptist, and so my view of the wine (or grape juice in the case of my church) is that there is nothing mystical about it. The elements are as Luke 17:19 states: a remembrance. It's like the U.S. flag, evoking within us feelings of pride in our heritage, the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, our constitution, our diversity and power. But the flag itself is not the United States. It is a piece of cloth that represents the United states. In the same way, the bread and the wine is not God. It is something that represents what God did. But this is a trivial nuance of dogma, and there is no need to dwell on it.

Watching the children line up to take communion reminded me of a documentary that I saw on the History Channel the night before about the Jim Jones cult, in which 913 people, including 276 children, committed "revolutionary suicide" in 1978. It was an incident that impressed me at the time, provoking me to write a letter to TIME that was published in the December 25th edition. "Jones saw the handwriting on the wall, and the words spelled nuclear war," I wrote. "So, choosing to march to a different drumbeat, Jones' disciples followed him into the jungle. Their humanistic dream: to build a better world. But, as it turned out, the handwriting was a forgery, the drummer was mad, the humanism bankrupt, and the dream a nightmare." The documentary showed kids and teenagers lining up to take their cynide-laced Flavor-Aid joy juice. A few resisted Jones' communion of death and were either injected or shot. But the majority were swept into annihilation by a collective death wish.

It is both scary and fascinating to see how organizations can envelope even tough-minded people. In the Jones case, there were a few people who protested, most notably, Christine Miller. The transcript of the final moments of those who died is chilling, as it reveals the power of pathological group thinking. In the back-and-forth between Christine Miller and Jones, the balance could have tipped towards life, but the force of the fanaticism of the true believers was too great. So she, along with Jones and almost a thousand others died.

I'm not suggesting a parallel with the Catholic church and this aberrant death-cult. However, even in religious organizations that are life-affirming, we must remain ever vigilant against losing our soul in the name of a supposed greater good.

Free Will and Virginia Tech

Is there any point in adding to the explanatory mix for the Virginia Tech massacre a collapse in moral responsibility?

I believe that the answer is: yes. Elsewhere on this website, I have written on the question of free will, decisively afirming that it does exist and it is axiomatic to understanding ourselves, ethics, and law. To put it in the negative, I reject as morally suspect and emperically unjustifiable theories that affirm predestination, kismet, fate, astrology, behavorism, and the like.

In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, I'm willing to concede that his actions were the confluence of forces that he and we cannot comprehend. But there is a point where background forces stop and individual choices begin. In the case of this incident, moral responsibility doesn't merely rest with the shooter. From his own admissions, he had self-awareness, enough so as to prevent this tragedy from unfolding. And the same is true with other actors in this drama-- the police and judges, the psychologists and counselors, teachers and students, legislators and citizens. The confluence of countless decisions converged to produce an immoral act.

The Choice

"One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God...one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imaging the attributes of Divinity in them."

Simone Weil

Liberalism

This is what liberalism is according to Newt.

And here is a somewhat more coherent understanding of this term.

The word liberal is used prejoratively in modern discourse. But I think it is only because many of us are reluctant to embrace this word. It's a word that denotes a way of looking at power and liberty that is consistent with the thinking of our founding fathers and our greatest presidents.

Newt finds in the philosophy of modern-day liberalism moral relativism and a contempt for the sanctity of life, which is just a tad hypocritical for an adulteror who supports wars that use weapons of mass destruction.

Gingrich Defends Concealed Weapons

(ABC News) Former Speaker of the House and potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., speculated that concealed weapons could have mitigated the Virginia Tech massacre.
"In states where people have been allowed to have concealed weapons, in Mississippi and Kentucky, there have been incidents of this kind of a killer who were stopped, because in fact, people who are law-abiding people, who are rational, and people who are responsible had the ability to stop them," Gingrich told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

The best way to test an argument is to take it to its extreme. Why not allow people on airplanes, in courtrooms, and in legislatures to pack heat? And on what basis can we assume that rational and responsible people are always rational and responsible? Newt's statement is silly and dangerous.

A Boy Named Sue

Today's New York Times obituaries mention the death of Kelsie Harder, one of the world's leading onomasticians-- an expert in names and their origins. His rumination about why his parents gave him a girl's name sparked his interest in this area of scholarship. Dr. Harder's parents wanted to give him an unsusual name and liked the sound of Elsie, his sister's. They stuck a "K" in front of Elsie.

"We are at the mercy of our name givers," he said. "These things influence us for the rest of our lives, and we have nothing to do with it."

As an author of two books on baby names, he warned that boys name "Jr" ended up on psychoanalyst's couches.

I'm also intrigued by the choices some parents make in naming their children, and I wonder what provokes them to call their kids after brand names ("Mercedes," "Tiffany"), names that are overly religious ("Jesus", "Mohammed"), and names that have a new age cast ("Africa", "Rainbow"). As in the Johnny Cash's song, the unfortunately named can prevail despite or because of their name. However, for some, it may be a psychic wound that festers for their entire life. In Dr. Harder's case, it appears that his name didn't hurt him, and he even gave his first name to his son, but without the "Jr."

Most parents want their children to both stand out-- be individuals in their own right-- and fit in-- be accepted by peers. In the early years of life, conformity has more value than non-conformity as the former is needed to build a base for achieving. If this is so, I suggest that a child's name needs to pass the snicker test. Kids in the early grades spend more brain power than we sometimes appreciate figuring out ways to needle their classmates, and a poorly-chosen name is a hurdle that most kids don't need at that time in their life.

When we chose our two son's names, we considered diminutives, initials, word sounds, syllable counts, and connection to heritage to arrive at what we think are names that they can take pride in for the rest of their lives. We think we chose the right names.

Desert Ridge Marriot

We spent the morning at a time share presentation at the J.W. Marriot Desert Ridge Resort, leaving wiser but not poorer.

F is for Feijoada

a Brazilian dish:
sausages, beef, pork, and beans--
but no fish.

flagrante delicto
felo de se
finalism
fribble
fish gallery
fungible
fey
furbelow
frog's march (as for a prisoner)
FASB 13
fasces
faute de mieux

Memo to John Edwards

"Campaign records now reveal that John Edwards was using his campaign money to get $400 haircuts in Beverly Hills," says Jay Leno. "But Edwards insists this is in keeping with his view that there are two Americas: one that pays $400 for a haircut, and the other America that spends its money on stupid things like rent and food."

In view of Edwards' ribbing for having a $400 haircut, may I suggest Great Clips, where I had my haircut today?

Haircut 12.00
Coupon minus 4.00
Tip 2.00
Total 9.99

Savings for the John ("A Man of the People") Edwards Campaign: $390.01

Interpreting the Bible

(A skeptical interloculor gave me some verses to puzzle over. Here are my responses and also his counterpoint.)

Mark 16:18 says that if a Christian drinks deadly poison, it won't hurt him at all. Are you a Christian? If I gave you some poison, would you drink it? Ready to put your money where your mouth is? Ready to "step out in faith?"

This particular verse (actually verses 9-20) is not found in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. But, accepting that it is in the canon, I would simply interpret it as an admonition to embrace faith and confidence irrespective of the challenges that life throws. I see nothing in that verse commanding self-harm or foolishness.

Not obvious but not unreasonable either.

I read in Matthew 2:23 that it was spoken by the prophets that "He [Jesus] shall be called a Nazarene." Can you find this prophecy in the Old Testament for me, please, or in any other writing that existed prior to 31 AD?

This is a reference most likely to Isa. 11.1, where the Messiah is spoken as "a rod (netzer) out of the stem of Jesse."

This probably is how Jesus came to be called a Nazarene, but it doesn't get the author of Matthew off the hook for ignorance and/or pious fiction, because (i) netzer is Hebrew and doesn't appear in the Septuagint (the Greek translation that the author of Matthew and his audience were familiar with), and (ii) the author of Matthew doesn't think Nazarene means rod, he thinks it means person from Nazareth.

Ecclesiastes 1:4 says that the earth will last forever; II Peter 3:10 says that it won't. Which do you believe?

The former is a reference to the terrestial world which will someday be consumed by flames in distinction to the celestial world which will last forever.

Did you mean "latter"? Either way, both references are clearly to the terrestrial earth.

Do you believe that anyone has ever seen God? Isaiah said he did (Isaiah 6:1); but John said (twice) that nobody has ever seen God at any time (I John 4:12; John 1:18). Who's lying, John or Isaiah?

They are both telling the truth. If you read the chapter in Isaiah, it is clear that he is not seeing the God that John references but a vision of God. John's God is idenbtified with the God of John 1:1 which is Logos-- roughly, spirit or concept.

No. It was presumably a singular occurence that one might have taken for a dream, but the author goes out of his way to specify, "[...] my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

II Thessalonians 2:11-12 says that God sends a powerful delusion to certain people, causing them to believe a lie, so that they will be condemned (i.e., spend eternity suffering in hell). Isn't this, frankly, immoral? Isn't this what Christians accuse Satan (the father of lies - John 8:44) of doing? If you were God, would you cause people to believe a lie? Why?

You left out the verse prior in which those that perish have within them "all deceivableness of unrighteousness...because they received not the love of truth." There is no immorality, as those who reject God choose to do so "that they should believe the lie." If I were God, I would give people the capacity for self-deception as this section intimates.

It's a confusing passage and the reading you suggest would be possible in isolation, but it's unlikely in view of all the other verses in Paul where God is depicted as forcing people to do evil things and then judging them for it. In particular, in Romans 9, Paul endorses the plain reading of Exodus where God hardens Pharaoh's heart to force him to disobey and then destroys him for disobeying.

I recently saw the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, basically a re-telling of the Bryan-Scopes "monkey" trial. While I admire the movie for its drama, I consider it to be just as dishonest and as fallacious as these so-called contradictions. The person who authored these "propositions" adopted what s/he clearly thought was the most fundamentalist interpretation possible irrespective of whether such propositions are embraced either in mainstream Christianity of even by minor sects within Christianity. No one can read the Bible without acknowledging that vast portions of it are allegory and ambiguity. At the end of the day, the Scopes trial was not a question of science versus religion, but a simple question of law, of which the defendent was correctly found guilty of violating.

The Bible doesn’t interpret itself. We interpret the Bible, and we all read the same words in different ways. A person who claims that the Bible must be read literally hasn’t read enough of the Bible to justify that statement. Some books such as the Song of Solomon make no sense at all unless read allegorically. We can read Biblical justifications for slavery (such as The Epistle to Philemon), polygamy (the biographies of the kings and patriarchs of the Old Testament), the holocaust (from the Gospel of John and the writings of Martin Luther and others), and the flatness of the earth. The Bible’s doctrine of the flat earth, believed by all the writers of the Bible and Jesus as well as Calvin and Luther, is an example of why we must be cautious in applying broad brush principles of interpretations to such a complex book with so many different styles of writing, authors, and messages.

The problem with Biblical interpretation is that the Bible is like an ink-blot. We see what we want to see in them, which is in turn a projection of our own psychology, life's journey, and ways of processing information. Sometimes, the fundamentalist can be closer to the core truth of things that the skeptic. Earlier, I alluded to the Scopes trial, of which William Jennings Bryan was a spear carrier for the creationists. Among those opposing him was the agnostic journalist H.L. Mencken. His caustic columns laid bear the hypocrisy of the fundamentalism of the 1920s. But it was Bryan was who the progressive-- in fact one of the leading lights of progressivism (or what we call liberalism today) at the turn of the last century, fighting for women's suffrage and direct elections and against business trusts and eugenics, whereas Mencken, who was on the right side of scientific truth and a wonderful writer was also a reactionary of the old school, a bigot, an anti-semite, and an apologist of Hitlerism.

When it comes to each individual's epistomology, nothing and no one is entirely right or wrong, truthful or dishonest.

I cannot say for sure that there is no history in some of the more ancient books of the Old Testament. Genesis, for example, may well be tribal campfire stories that borrowed from the oral traditions of many other tribes. They may contain no fact, nuggets of fact, or be completely factual. We have no way of knowing for sure. But we do know that they were preserved for a reason. And one of those reasons is the power that these stories continue to invoke—moral choice in the Garden of Eden, the illusion of human pride in the , hate and bloodshed in Cain and Abel, and man’s long groping struggle to find moral redemption and God that culminates in the Christmas and Easter stories. It’s these sweeping themes that continue to resonate for me in our Brave New World of gas chambers and gulags, atomic missiles, and human cloning.

Without getting into the specifics of different schools of critical interpetation, I would say that a good rule of thumb for myself is that the more ambiguous a passage is, the less spiritually important or morally significant it is. And, needless to say, there are many passages in the Bible that fall into that category.

Bush Poetry

(Harken Allen Ginsbergh and Jack Kerouac to the president's free verse as delivered in a single speech on April 19th in Ohio. Groovy. )

Everbody wants to be loved . . .not everybody.
If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about.
Death is terrible.
Polls just go poof.
Remember the rug?

E is for Eels

Eels are serpentine, slippery, and thin
but impaled on boards you can peel off their skin.

executory
escent - being
eblis
ecce homo - John xix.5
ecce signum -- behold the proof
ecdysiast - stripteaster
elf-marked
entelechy
ERISA
estival
Eraclius
escritoire
ebullition
escritoire
euratom
euphenics
eidolon
enounce

I'm Thinking of a Number - Part II

The massacre in Virginia provokes wonderment. Where was the Department of Homeland Security? How can someone with a record for mental instability buy a glock with about as much ease as buying tickets to a basketball game? And what can be done to prevent this from happening again?

As to the first question: The answer is that the Department of Homeland Security is indeed impotent. Hurricane Katrina established that. It was only public pressure that caused the department to increase border security and shipping container verification.

As to the second question: I think enough Americans believe that the Second Amendment guarantees them the right to have their kids blow off their heads that I don't think that there will be any new gun restrictions. Not even the Democrats want to play around this third rail of politics. The human mind is still largely terra incognita. and predicitng violence is at best an imperfect science.

What can be done to prevent this from happening again? While Americans value their freedom, their are stronger countervailing trends, such as the trends towards diversity, mobility, computerization, and terrorism. I predict we will see shortly a behavior score, much like the credit scoring neural nets used by credit card issuers, that will be part of an individual's existence from the day they are born or immigrate into this country to the day they die or leave this country. This number will be the focus of interlocking databases consisting of crime and psychological reports and perhaps other kinds of reports that would throw up red flags and at least communciate more information than gun sellers now get. It will be the creation of a true permanent record. From a civil liberties perspective, I don't view this as likely soon, but it is inevitable-- something that society will embrace to by acclamation. Already, we are photographed about twenty times each day, and software now exists to cross-reference and correlate face image and behavior. I don't believe the presumption for civil liberties and privacy will prevail against the demand for increased security. The United States of the future is the People's Republic of China today.

I'm Thinking of A Number - Part I

``If we lose," Karl Rove said "they will follow.''

For the sake of argument, let's accept the Bush administration's premise, that we are in the midst of a global war on terror of uncertain duration and cost, and that the Iraqi war wasn't fabricated from whole cloth to re-elect the president. At this point, there is only one number that would persuade me. That number is: two. Bush has two children, and that neither of them is willing to sacrifice themselves on the alter of liberty at least makes me think that this so-called war is nothing more than a politicized fantasy.

The Bullied

(AP) - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice.
As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China."

In incidents such as the Virginia Tech slayings, there is no single reason why a man to turns into a madman. But the way Cho's peers treated him is a factor.

Like Cho, I immigrated to America at an early age. Cho was eight, I was ten and we both had accents. In my case, that provoked sadistic glee from a certain percentage at Council Rock, a house of horrors that made the Stephen King movie Carrie look wholesome. Three decades haven't dimmed the misery of that shark pool-- a bovine-faced George Blackwell shaking me down for my milk money, the dwarf James Kilcoyne whose nose I bloodied after one tussel, and yet another greaser who threw me up against the lockers and was killed three days later with a knife in the ribs. Cho's sister graduated from Princeton, and I adopted the same strategy of escaping the bullies by excelling and achieving. The succession of failures and successes also increased my self-confidence and my generally boyant personality also cushioned me from the kind of despair that turned Cho into a psychotic murderer.

I have in my medical files the x-rays of my ten-year old son from 2003. It shows a broken clavicle-- a fracture of the collarbone admnistered by Michael Friedman, an especially vile classroom bully. I suppose it is both a right of passage to navigate the jungle of bullies but also a shock to realize that not everyone acts with decency. Whittaker Chamber's in his fine and frightening autobiography Witness recounts how in first-grade he watched a group of his classmates urinate on a lollypop and then offer it in innocent friendliness to a newcomer. "The watched him with birdlike intentness while he held it in his hand. As he put it to his mouth, they burst into shrieks of derision, doubled up with laughter, slapped their knees and whooped around him like Indians. I think it was at that point that I developed a deep distrust of the human race. It was not only the filthy act that disgusted me. Something else shocked me much more deeply: the thought that inspired the act, its absolutely unmotivated malice, and the complete boyish guileness of the faces watching the victim. From that moment I hated school and everything about it. I was always expecting somebody to offer me a lollypop in one form or another."

The Columbine killers were also victims of bullies. This shouldn't mitigate their crimes or in anyway diminish the human toll the murders exacted. But to prevent such actions from happening again, I think it behooves us to reflect on how we treat the Chos-- the most fragile and the most alienated-- that are among us. Ramping up on gun laws and inducing better living through chemistry doesn't address root causes of these human explosions. Nor do I think the answer is to eradicate mechanisms that differentiate the mediocre from the excellent, such as grades, honor societies, and wealth. But I do believe that people who for whatever reason are given advantages that elevate them in life should reciprocate by treating others-- including and especially the unlovely and the unsmart ---with kindness and efforts at understanding.

Giuliani the Draft Dodger

There are many people that share my skepticism that John McCain is the shining hero of the Hanoi Hilton. There are many questions that need to be asked, such as the precise circumstances that led to his capture and his behavior while in prison. The Republican's Manchurian Candidate may have some explaining to do as well as records to release. Perhaps the only things that prevents McCain from being swift-boated is the presumption that he won't be the Republican candidate.

The conventional wisdom is that Rudy Giuliani will be the Republican candidate. As with his values, credentials, and stand on issues in general, there is less than meets the eye. It appears that Rudy was an especially oily draft dodger during the Viet Nam war. Of course, he is in good company, with Clinton and Cheney among others. And yet if Giuliani is going to make national security the paramont issue in the 2008 election, I don't think it is rude to ask what exactly he did to answer our nation's call to arms at another time of peril.

From a tactical perspective, it's appropriate for the Democrats to hold their fire at present. In many respects, he is the worst possible candidate that the Republicans could want. His liberal stands cancel out the liberal stands by the Democratic candidates, and his character-- his treatment of his many wives and children-- is laughable and despicable.

Miscellenia

1. Dogs are more prone to nervous breakdowns than any other non-human animal.

2. Gustave Le Bob: "Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us peace or happiness."

3. Eggs contain lecithin to emulsify cholesterol and can't do you any harm.

4. The length of Pluto's year is 248 earth-years.

5. A chick hatches in 21 days.

6. An ancient Celtic rhyme puts the age of animals thusly: Thrice the age of a dog is a horse. Thrice the age of a horse is a man. Thrice the age of a man is a deer. Thrice the age of a deer is that of an eagle.

7. The wildcat is a fastidious feline. Sme won't eat meat that they did not kill themselves.

8. Falling stars are said by Mahometans to eb firebrands flung by good angels against evil spirits when they approach too near the gates of heaven.

9. Oceans and inland seas contain 97.2 percent of earth's water.

10. Scientific hypothesis gain confidence not by finding proof but by repeatendly escaping disproof in fair tests.

Memo to John Markell

Enjoy your $570. Brace yourself for a wave of wrongful-death lawsuits.

Markell, owner of Roanoke Firearms, sold Cho Seung-Hui the Glock 9-millimeter and ammunition that took the lives of thirty-two Americans.

We are a full service firearms and accessories dealer committed to serving our customers and
our community. Looking through our stock of over 350 firearms, you will find not only the brands and models discriminating enthusiasts demand, but also some of the newest cutting-edge items you won't find in many gun shops. Come on in and look around!

Ask about our concealed carry classes!

"Money-Making is a Jewish Tradition"

Former Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is "part of the Jewish tradition," and something that he applauded.

I don't know about that. But making money is certainly part of my tradition.

D is for Dicing

an onion and wincing
It's smaller than cubing but larger than mincing.

diapason
dipacmania
DV - God willing
dabaira
dotterel
domny - gone to the downy = gone to bed
de profundis - Psalm 130
dash my wig
demotic
dumb-bell nebula
double-barelled bond
damascene
defalcate
deuteragonist - actor playing a part of secondary importance

"A Right to Bear Arms"

"The President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms," said White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Parino, in reaction to the worst school massacre in U.S . "But," Miss Parino said, brightly, "all laws must be followed."

In the wake of this killing, we'll see the usual freak show. First will come the condolences from the Comforter in Chief, a blue ribbon panel, and perhaps a special on the Discoverer Channel. And then the NRA will trot out their usual talking points, the same ones that Ronald Reagan used after he was shot by another love-lorn kid. But nothing fundamental will change, and the killings and the terror will continue in this country that is awash in guns and violence, which perhaps at some diabolic level is precisely what this administration wants.

And what does the administration want as far as gun laws are concerned? It certainly is not an armed citizenry. When Hurricane Katrina and Rita struck New Orleans, police and national guard troops went from house to house confiscating guns on the orders of FEMA. But, in the meantime, Bush wants to feed its political base the red meat of gun ownership.

"I do believe in the constitutional right that everyone has, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, to carry a weapon," said John McCain hour after the shootings. I doubt that the senator means that the insane, children, and criminals are entitled to that right. Bush may have no such qualms in restricting gun ownership to Texan children, a point that a reporter raised at Parino's White House briefing.

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

My reading of the plain text is that the constitution places gun ownership in the context of a militia, which must be well-regulated and necessary to the security of a free state. In other words, it should be read subjunctively-- if you are in the militia, they will be no infringement on your right to have a gun. This right turns on how we define militia. If we define it narrowly, a militia is essentially the national guard. Or can we define it to include all citizens, whether they be liquor store owners or duck hunters? A strict constuctionist definition derives more likely from the former interpretation.

And then there is the question as to what is an arm. A slingshot? A thermonuclear bomb? In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court sustained a statute requring regulation of sawed of shot guns under the National Firearms Act, noting that ''[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than 18 inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well- regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.'' Since this decision, Congress has placed greater limitations on the receipt, possession, and transportation of firearms.

My hunch is that the events that transpired at Virgina Tech will not give impetus to increased regulation and confiscation of firearms using the same argument. It will, however, erode a right that isn't explicitly defined in the constitution-- the right to privacy. It is exceedingly rare that this kind of violence is the result of someone snapping. Rather, inevitably, the person that commits such atrocities doesn't whisper a warning-- he broadcasts it. Sulleness, hatefulness, feelings of depression, morbidity, helplessness, depersonalization, and hostility are the hallmarks of such killers. But so are they the hallmarks of creative and harmless people as well. Consider the one-act play that Cho Seung-Hui, the campus killer, wrote. It's vulgar and sophomoric, but no more so than the efforts of many vulgar sophomores. The upshot of the violence in Virginia will be I believe more conformity and less privacy while national policy towards gun ownership will remain unchanged.

The Wisdom of Benjamin Franklin

I had the good fortune to read the following essays by Benjamin Franklin at a young, impressionable age. They both contain remarkable good sense.

Advice to a Young Tradesman

The Whistle

Eat, Drink, and Be Pretty

... at the 2007 Scottsdale Culinary Festival. Nancy volunteered yesterday and we went as a family today to sample some of more than 50 of the valley's finest restaurants.

Yet one more reason why Scottsdale rocks. If you're rich, you live in Beverly Hills. If you're famous, you live in Malibu. If you're lucky, you live in Scottsdale.




(I, with my ubiquitous New York Times, and my boy are enjoying the band at the festival. We're wearing the volunteer team's t-shirts.)

The Witch of Wall Street

Hetty Green (1834-1916) was possibly the most wealthy woman from the Gilded Age. Her advice is from a chapter "Counsels of Successful Men" in a book Success and How to Win It, published in 1904.

1. Invest in real estate. Buy a house for $5,000 that can soon be sold for $6,000.
2. Be satisfied with a profit the proportion of which corresponds to the size of the investment.
3. Success is a stranger to imitation. People with money to invest should pay no attention to the doings of others but look on things from their own point of view.
4. The goal of success is not always reached by the roughest road. The path is an easy one to find. That is why so many people miss it.

Counsel and Caution

Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of. -- Franklin

Seest thou a man diligent in business, he shall stand before kings. -- Solomon

It is worth a thousand pounds a year to have the habit of looking on the bright side of things. -- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed. -- Sydney Smith

The truest wisdom is resolute determination. -- Napoleon.

Dear Mr. President

I consider the following song that Pink performed on the Jimmy Kimmel show Wednesday night one of the finest social protest songs I've heard, equal to be best that Woody and Arlo Guthrie wrote decades ago. It's too bad that the president will never hear it as he has the entire reality-based world on ignore. Here are the lyrics.

"Dear Mr. President" Dear Mr. President, Come take a walk with me. Let's pretend we're just two people and You're not better than me. I'd like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly. What do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street? Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep? What do you feel when you look in the mirror? Are you proud? How do you sleep while the rest of us cry? How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye? How do you walk with your head held high? Can you even look me in the eye And tell me why? Dear Mr. President, Were you a lonely boy? Are you a lonely boy? Are you a lonely boy? How can you say No child is left behind? We're not dumb and we're not blind. They're all sitting in your cells While you pave the road to hell. What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away? And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay? I can only imagine what the first lady has to say You've come a long way from whiskey and cocaine. How do you sleep while the rest of us cry? How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye? How do you walk with your head held high? Can you even look me in the eye? Let me tell you 'bout hard work Minimum wage with a baby on the way Let me tell you 'bout hard work Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away Let me tell you 'bout hard work Building a bed out of a cardboard box Let me tell you 'bout hard work Hard work Hard work You don't know nothing 'bout hard work Hard work Hard work Oh How do you sleep at night? How do you walk with your head held high? Dear Mr. President, You'd never take a walk with me. Would you?

Why I Don't Watch Katie Couric

Perhaps in trying to atone for Dan Rather's unfactual broadcast on Bush's military service, the CBS Evening News is now broadcasting fabrications about the democrats.

On April 12, Katie Couric in her notebook again resurrected the canard that Barack Obama studied in a madrassa, a charge that was debunked by the Chicago Tribune, CNN, ABC, AP, and other media outlets.

Anyway, here is Journalist Couric's scribblings and my commentary in italics.

COURIC: Hi, everyone.

Isn't this Dr. Nick's line on the Simpsons cartoon show?

Is America ready to elect a president who grew up praying in a mosque?

An authoritative introduction. Alas, it is a lie. Couric could have pushed the envelop a bit by stating something just as nonsensical. How about: Is America ready to elect a president who was Elvis' love child?

Barack Obama has arguably the most diverse religious background of any candidate ever. He was raised in Indonesia by a Christian mother and Muslim stepfather and attended a Catholic school -- but while growing up, also studied Islam.

So? I studied Islam in tenth grade. Does that make me a Taliban wannerbe?

That background sparked rumors

So CBS is now in the rumor dissemination business? A more honest and interesting story would highlight who sparked these rumors.

that he had studied in a radical madrassa, or Quranic school -- rumors his campaign denied, declaring that Obama is now a practicing Christian.

Couric is practicing the National Enquirer method of journalism. Fabricate a rumor, get the target to deny the rumor, and then in the name of "balance" continue to fan the rumor.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times interviewed people who grew up with Obama. "We prayed in the mosque," one of them said, "but not seriously," noting that Obama also prayed with his Catholic schoolmates.

Last month, I interviewed people who grew up with Katie. "Miss Couric is most certainly the love child of Elvis." one of them said.

It's too soon to know what America will decide about Barack Obama or his background, but it's not too soon to wonder if America will see that as an asset or a liability.

What a weaselly conclusion. A bit like: While Miss Couric is Elvis' love child, time will tell if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

That's a page from my notebook. I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

At least she didn't call the man Barack Osama.

Perhaps chastened by posts such as mine in the blogosphere, Managing Editor Couric has blue-penciled her ruminations. It's still incoherent and adds nothing to our knowledge of Mr. Obama. The additions are in bold, as follows:

Is America ready to elect a President whose connections with Islam were the subject of rumor and innuendo?

Barack Obama has arguably the most diverse religious background of any candidate, ever. He was raised in Indonesia by a Christian mother and Muslim stepfather, and attended a Catholic school, but while growing up, also studied Islam. That background sparked rumors that he had studied in a radical madrasa, or Koranic school – rumors later disproved . Obama is now a practicing Christian.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times interviewed a person who grew up with Obama. In the LA Times article he said, "We prayed in the mosque, but not seriously," noting that Obama also prayed with his Catholic schoolmates. In a later Chicago Tribune article, however, the source said he was not certain whether they prayed together.

It's too soon to know what America will decide about Barack Obama or his background.

But it's not too soon to wonder if America will see that background as an asset...or a liability.

(sigh)

C is for Coffee

in cups that won't wobble
whether brulot, au lait, cafe noir, or diable.

clepsydra
constitutional psychopathic inferiority
chapter of possibilities-- a may-be in the course of events
cy pres
cat stane
certiorari
child of the cord-- condemned to be hanged
cachecope bell
cag mag
cussedness
cut blocks with a razor
creel
ceram
canape
closed lien
chary
chauvin
curb height
col
cantrip
chiliasm -- doctrine of Christ's expected return to reign on earth for 1,000 years
colophon
cimmerian
chyme
copacetic
cicatrix
cloisonne
coulomb

Otters Holding Hands

http://youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno

Constipation Cures

Constipation is a health ailment that causes disturbance in the digestion system. This gives rise to toxins that are carried to all parts of the body. Constipation becomes a cause of diseases such as rheumatism, high blood pressure, and cancer. Symptoms include difficulty in elimination, headaches, and depression. Unhealthy eating habits, emotional stress, lack of physical exercise, and an insufficient intake of water are some of the causes of constipation.

I once read somewhere that ninety percent of all diseases have their roots in constipation. In talking about bowel movements, there is a of course a snicker factor. But this is a serious disease that can result in death. I think there is also another kind of constipation that saps the mind and soul and sometimes the body as well.

One kind of constipation is an abnormal need to hold onto stuff. I've seen folks who are otherwise normal find that they have a need to accumulate for the sake of accumulating. Often, they are things that have no sentimental or practical use-- clothes that are too small, magazines from years previous, and junk in general. Sometimes, we must destroy in order to build, throw out in order to take in. The destruction of the great cities of Japan and Germany during World War II prepared the way for industrial resurgence in the post war years that might not have otherwise taken place. And so that is also true with us. Each year, we go through our house and put into a big pile things that we plan to give to charity, freeing up space as well as allowing us to upgrade where we need to our wardrobe or appliances. Sometimes, also, excessive outside activies-- doing rather than being-- creates a weariness of the soul that is akin to constipation.

And there is spiritual constipation. I'm struck by the prodigious memories of some people who nurse and rehearse slights that they have received over the years. They play back in their minds I suspect with pelasure events from sometimes decades ago of teachers, classmates, bosses, siblings, or parents. In some cases, these people are ghosts-- they exist only in the memory loop of the offended. There is some value in looking look back over the past. But an obsessive and unbalanced focus on the most negative episodes in our life's journey can only damage us-- put us in a ever-deepening pit of self-pity and self-hate. To get out of this funk onto the path to a centered and fulfilling life, we must disenthrall ourself from those ancient spectres by consciously rejecting those resentments. So to all those bad memories that haunt us, I say let them go, and good riddance.

Recently, my wife and I saw Billy Crystal's humorous and heartfelt 700 Sundays at the Gammage. It deals with his adolescence and growing up on Long Island and in the jazz world of Manhatten. The play took on a poignancy when Crystal talks about his father Jack, who died when he was 15-- or about 700 Sundays together. Towards the end of the show, Crystal argues with God as to why this had to be so-- an event that threw a shadow over his entire life. He resolves the debate by going through a metaphorical pack of cards-- tossing a few such as the death of his dad-- but holding others such as his heritage, his family and marriage, and his work. And to me that's a great way to look at it. Life gives us a deck of cards, and in some cases the deck is filled with low numbers. But we can still play the great game, dispensing with the the bad and keeping the good to the point that much of our own life is good.

The Entrepreneur

Business has in all ages past led nations onward in the march of civilizations. It's a royal leader that conquers the world without staining its hands in human blood. Instead of marking its course with ruined harvests, burning villages, and smoking heaps of once blooming cities, as the demon war, it leaves behind growing towns, populous cities, and flowing rivers, that bear the wealth and products of industrious millions.

This is the day of the entrepreneur. His restless, dauntless spirit pushes the pioneer in new and unknown regions. Hr breaks the praries and makes the desert bloom. The mountains yield to him their gold, the sea its treasure.

Entrepreneurs build our cities and rear our manufactories. They whiten the oceans with their cruisers and blacken the heavens with their jets. They push their roads and railroads across distant lands and lift their business palaces until they pierce the clouds.

Who would not be an entrepreneur? The physician trades his medical skill, the lawyer his ingenious tongue, the preacher his sermons, the teacher his instructions, the merchant his wares, the mariner his cargo, the farmer his produce.

The smallest beginning, followed by certain, strong, advancing steps, secures the grandest success. The lack of capital ought not to deter the ambitious youth from going into business. Most of the world's rich men and women have started in liufe with no other capital than their brains. The main thing is to get to work at something and to grow. The goddess of fortune must be wooed to be won. She smiles upon the poor boy as well as the monarch. At one time, she fixes her eye upon the beggtar boy as he asks for food from door to door, to be repulsed everywhere. She takes his hand and leads him up as if by magic through the various grades of society until she establishes him in a place and fills hi coffers with gold. She beckons with friendly hand only the intelligent, the virtuous, the brave, the good, the industrious, who kneel at her alter and breath their supplications there. This illustrates the simple truth too often lost sight of by the world. It is that favors go where they belong.

Fortune favors the brave, and the entrepreneur who would rise must climb. The stepping stones that lead up to the temple of prosperity are hewn for all by the unseen hand of God into the rock of eternal truth.

A Waste of Time

Consider the two following news items.

President George W. Bush invited Democrats to the White House on Tuesday to discuss the standoff over Iraq war funding, but he made clear he wouldn't negotiate any schedule for pulling U.S. troops out of the country.

After receiving what he deemed an insufficient response from the State Department, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is reiterating his request for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to appear before the panel on April 18 to answer questions about administration claims that Iraq tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger.

What do they both have in common? The answer: They are both exercises in futility and an utter waste of time. Bush won't negotiate-- try to find common ground with his political foes. The Democratic leaders have no interest in having Bush lecture them as if they were third graders. Nothing can be gained from such a meeting. And nor can anything be gained by requiring that Dr. Rice appear before Waxman's inquisition. The Libby trial established the facts and the most significant fact is that the administration ginned the selling of the Iraq war with a tapestry of lies. Wacman's panel has no other purpose than to further embarass the administration.

I just wish both sides of the aisle would address the serious and difficult issues with flexibility, common sense, and a sense of urgency. Given the political charged climate in which we now live, I doubt that this will be possible.

Imus' Technocolor Castration

Effective immediately, MSNBC will no longer simulcast the "Imus in the Morning" radio program. This decision comes as a result of an ongoing review process, which initially included the announcement of a suspension. It also takes into account many conversations with our own employees. What matters to us most is that the men and women of NBC Universal have confidence in the values we have set for this company. This is the only decision that makes that possible. Once again, we apologize to the women of the Rutgers basketball team and to our viewers. We deeply regret the pain this incident has caused.

—Statement from NBC News

The I-man must be flumoxed by his fall from grace. For years, Imus' shock jock rants defined the air waves and blazed the way for the screachings of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage As Marty Kaplan writes, this has less to do with heightened sensitivities to Imus' ho-talk than it does to corporate profits. "Their effect may be to debase discourse, inflame prejudice, sow ignorance, exculpate criminality, incite rancor, ruin reputations, and stoke the right-wing base - but their effect is not their job. Their job is to make money for the corporations that employ them. We may revile them for being Rove's toadies, but we're chumps if we ignore how relentlessly the companies that employ them monetize their noxious shtick."

I am also impressed at the dissonance of the most conservative media outlets, notably Fox, wallowing in fifth to make a buck. For all the hand-wrining over "Teheran Rosie's" silly words, they don't come any where near to the unrelenting stream of vulgarity and agitprop that the right wing media spews each evening.

Who's Who Among Outstanding Students

One of my boys got an invitationto be featured in the 2006-2007 edition of Who's Who Among Outstanding Students in America. While I think this falls short of a scam, it basically follows the same pattern that you see among vanity publishers of poetry and geneology books. Mass mailings are sent to a cohort of which a percentage will respond by eventually paying for an expensive but otherwise unread book.

Bill Gates and Hotmail

I am grateful for Bill's hotmail. But, like the blue screen of death (otherwise known as undocumented functionality), Microsoft's software is far from perfect.

Server Temporarily Unavailable

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We are working as quickly as possible to end this delay, so please check as often as you wish to see if you can sign in. If you keep seeing this message, it means the server is still unavailable. We appreciate your patience, and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

B is for Bordeaux

superior red wine
made of cabernet grapes
that mature on the vine

Banquo
blue stellar object
beach bunny
bowser bag
belles-lettres
billet-deux
Bardolph
Belmerino (Lord Belmerino was beheaded, but the executioner at the first stroke cut only half his neck and his lordship turned around and grinned at the bungler.)
Baga de Secretis
Beggar's Bush
Bawtry
black book
baize
barrel fever
breviary
bagatelle
burn artist-- narcotics seller who cheats his customers
biretta
bardolater
bathize - baptize by total immersion
bibliosnitch - book stealer
beltline
buncombe
BCD - binary coded decimal
Bozonian

Page Rank Factors

Page Rank Factors

Google Algorithm's Top Five Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use In Title Tags – "Notice number one – that you have HTML title tags that reflect the key terms you want your page to be found for. That's been the advice since I first starting writing about SEO back in 1996. Eleven years later – and even in the age of it's all about links -- it remains the top ranked tip by so many experts. – Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land.

2. Global Link Popularity of Site (The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web – both link quality and quantity) – "Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that's a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered." – Lucas Ng (a.k.a. shor), Fairfax Digital online marketing analyst.

3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link – "Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is 'about'." – Mike McDonald, WebProNews

4. Link Popularity within Site's Internal Link Structure (Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page) – "As mentioned on my blog, you can pulse a page's rankings by including and excluding links to it from your home page." – Russ Jones, Virante CTO.

5. Age of Site (Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines) – "We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the 'parent' site that has already gained trust." – Chris Boggs, Search Engine Land Associate Editor.

Our 14th Wedding Anniversary

Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
When our time has come
We will be as one
God bless our love

The Man Behind the Curtain

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," said the Wizard of Oz in the 1939 movie by the same name. For the entire Bush presidency, the man behind the curtain has been that éminence grise and walking rollodex,Vice President Richard Cheney. He reminds me of the consiglieri Tom Hagen in the Godfather movies, both chilling and effective, the consummate fixer and occasional kneecaper:

Sal as he is about to be executed for treason against the family: "Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times' sake?" Tom: "Can't do it Sally"

Cheney seemed to ooze competence and gravitis, bringing dimension and heft to Bush's light-weight qualifications. He represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives for six terms, served the first George Bush as defense secretary, and ascended the pinnacle in the private sector as chairman and CEO of the multinational construction company Halliburton where he earned $2. 2 million and held another $10 million in stock options. Thus, given his qualifications, it does puzzle me that the Bush administration under his steadfast counsel is now a train-wreck, from the Scooter Libby conviction, to the Hurricane Katrina and Veteran hospital scandels, to most notably the idiotic assumptions that brought about what may very well be the most catastropic foreign affairs failure in the last hundred years, a failure that could bring the Republican Party to its knees in 2008.

It may very well have been that Cheney's so-called competence was an illusion, much like that of the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps a kind of psychosis emerged out of that macabre group hug of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice to create serial failure. In some areas, the Bush administration has done well, such as in relations to the People's Republic of China and in the growth of employment. But all of that is overshadowed by the miscalculations that led us into war by the one man with the international expertise to have known better, Richard ("Dick") Cheney.

Bush's Consiglieri Stumbles

Flat Daddy on the Homefront

As deployments for the military continue to stretch, the stay-at-home mom is trying to stem the tear drops of their children by building a Flat Daddy. Sometimes, it's the other way around-- the stay-at-home dad builds a Flat Mommy. This is a life-size paper doll, often on foam board, with a photo of their loved one. The deployed soldier sometimes get a Flat Kid-- a life-sized representation of their child to take to the barracks.

I cannot fault them for wanting this visual reinforcement. But these one-dimensional images are also a pathetic reminder of the disproportionate cost of this war to a narrow segment of our population. And the cost is not just in soldiers killed or maimed but also in kids who grow up in one-parent households. It once agains makes hollow claims that the current administration is the protector of family values, as a family sundered by a war of choice is anything but consistent with family values. The legacy of this war with its divided families are families at risk, and I predict we will see a surge of disfunction. The collateral damage of Bush's war will be spikes in divorce, drug abuse, teenage crime, and drop outs.

Did Pelosi Violate the Logan Act?

Did Nancy Pelosi break the law by talking to the Syrian dictatorship. According to a former chairman of the ABA standing committee on law and national security, the answer is yes.

Link

The relevant section of the Logan Act reads:

"Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

It's a dead letter law.

Every day, businessmen and also politicians from the US try to influence the policies of foreign countries to advance their interests without regard to stated US policy. Even the act of tranferring money across borders has this effect. Since 1799, it has been cited only ten times in the entire Federal court record and applied only once. Furthermore, Pelosi is a part of the government. The Constitution placed in the hands of Congress power that is currently exercised as in the power of the purse and power that is no longer exercised as in the power to declare war-- something that Congress hasn't done since 1941. Every year, congressmen fan out across the globe on "fact-finding" junkets to influence policy that servers their interests of their constitutents.

In the case of Pelosi, her presence in Syria coincided with the release of the British sailors in Iran, to which Syria ascribes some credit. Who is to say that behind the scenes the American delegation didn't in some measure shape this outcome? The fact is that the United States seems to look on engagement as some kind of a reward for our enemies, such as Iran and Syria. It seems to me, that this is a mistake, as events and conditions can be shaped by first of all connecting with those who are our enemies. This self-imposed unwillingeess to talk most significantly caused North Korea to develop nuclear weaponry.

Is there anyone to whom we shouldn't engage? For example, should the US break bread with Bin Laden? My answer is: we should even talk with to Bin Laden. The assumption is that the mere act of talking somehow is appeasement. It is only appeasement if we appease, and sometimes the absence of talking is an act of appeasement. We should be willing to interact even with a terrorist with the blood of Americans on his hands. This can only benefit us, as through interacting with him or his colleagues, we discern aims, tactics, and weaknesses. The only caveat is that such engagement should be done at the appropriate governmental level. In the case of stateless terrorists, a CIA operative will suffice. In the case of leaders of foreign countries, we should be prepared as Nixon did with Mao and Breshnev to engage at the highest levels.

History has answered the pragmatic question: does talking with our enemies work? The answer is: sometimes. The question now becomes: why won't Bush talk to our enemy leaders? My hypnothesis is that it is policy that springs from his character, that at the core, Bush and Cheney are both cowards, despite the big words and swagger. If they are unwilling to talk in unvetted audiences made up of Americans, I would have no expectation that they could prevail against Chavez, Castro, or Ahmadinejad.

F is For Feculant

fireworks - gun play
fish - a newly sentenced prisoner; also paper money
five c's - $500
fixer - one who squares a crook's affirs with the police
flag - an alias; a warning; to accost
flash - a gaudy person; to display; a rumor
flat - penniless
flat tire - an impotent or unproductive person
flimflam - cheat
flip - to board a moving train; utspoken
flipper - a hand
floater - migratory worker
flop - a bed; to sleep; to fail
fluff - a blonde woman
fluke - luck
fluter - degnerate
fly a kite - send an underground letter from prison; pass out worthless checks
flying light - hungry
front - a false appearance
fruit - generate
fry - to electrocute
full - intoxicated
funky - evil smelling

Miscellania

1. The Linnaean System: King Peter Came Over From Germany Seeking Fortune. (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, form).

2. Mosquitoes prefer blondes.

3. There are 332 dimples on the cover of a golf ball.

4. The average temperature in June in Phoneix is 101 and 64 in San Francisco.

5. 23 percent of all US households own at least one cat.

6. Anglican Archibishop Ussher said Creation began at 9 am, October 23, 4004 BC. The actual age, according to some scientists, is 12-13 billion years.

7. Museums use the Dermestes masculatus beetles to clean animal specimens.

8. Ounce for ouce, raw red peppers have four times more vitamin C than peeled oranges.

9. Water is 855 times dense than air.

10. Butterflies have the broadest known visual spectrum of any ceature on earth.

He Arose!

A is For Abram-Man

"By words," Aristophanes said 2,400 years ago, "is the mind excited and the spirit elated." The first verse of the Gospel According to John says that "In the beginning was the Word," and all my life, words have fascinated me. I collect words the same way other people collect stamps or coins. Between 1973 and 1993, I put together a book of almost three hundred pages for my own amusement of new words that I've encountered. To no small degree, my world is nothing more or less than my words. As my vocabulary expands, so too does my ability to reflect, to remember, and to choose.

I'm going post words in my blog that for one reason or another have intrigued me either because they are rare or because they are slang. An example is abram-man, meaning a naked vagabond. Google registers 1,280 hits for this word- of sufficient rarity to make it interesting to me.

The Abraham Ward, in Bedlam, had for its inmates begging lunatics, who used to array themselves “with party-coloured ribbons, tape in their hats, a fox-tail hanging down, a long stick with streamers,” and beg alms; but “for all their seeming madness, they had wit enough to steal as they went along.” —Canting Academy.

American Gothic

Violent crimes

-- There were 5.2 million violent crimes in the United States in 2005, up 2.5 percent from the previous year, the highest rate in 15 years.
-- In 2005, for every 1,000 persons age 12 or older, there occurred 1 rape or sexual assault, 1 assault with injury, and 3 robberies.
-- Murder, robbery and other violent crimes reported in the United States jumped 3.7 percent in the first half of 2006 over the same period in 2005, with robbery alone up by a starling 9.7 percent.
-- The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. In 2005, 477,040 victims of violent crimes stated that they faced an offender with a firearm. Campus shootings are rampant in the United States.

Crimes and Penalities

-- Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Justice has used the material witness warrant to imprison without charge at least 70 men.
-- Nearly three-quarters of terrorism suspects seized by the United States in the five years following the Sept. 11 attacks have not even made it to trial because of lack of evidence against them.
-- About three percent of the U.S. adult population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nation's prisons and jails or on probation or parole. The federal prisons were operating at 34 percent over capacity.
-- The United States is the only country in the world that allows the use of police dogs to terrify prisoners. Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans died in U.S. prisons and jails. More than 1.5 million inmates are released each year carrying life threatening contagious diseases.
-- At least 13 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons had suffered sexual assaults and many have suffered frequent sexual abuses. The number of prisoners who had suffered sexual assaults over the past 20 years is likely to exceed one million.

Privacy

-- Two-thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights. The use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005.
-- Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist Websites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active.
-- 76 percent of companies in the United States monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages.

Money Politics

-- In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than one million U.S. dollars had almost no chance of winning, The average successful Senate campaign cost 7 million dollars. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about 2.4 billion dollars.
-- Seventy-four percent of respondents to an opinion research poll say the U.S. Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they fell big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.
-- More than 1,000 government employees, including hundreds of police officers, have been convicted in FBI graft cases in the past two years.
-- Over the past five and half years, U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly 50 million U.S. dollars in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales.
-- From January 2000 through June 2005, House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days - a combined 222 years - on at least 23,000 trips. U.S. lawmakers accepted thousands of costly jaunts to some of the world's choicest destinations: at least 200 to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy.

Wealth and Poverty

-- The United States is the richest country in the world, but there were 37 million people, or 7.7 million families, living in poverty in 2005, accounting for 12.6 percent of total U.S. population, which means that one out of eight Americans was living in poverty.
-- 34.8 million Americans did not have enough money or other resources to buy food.
-- Currently, there are 600,000 or so homeless people nationwide, including 16,000 homeless in Washington D.C. and 3,800in New York City.
-- The number of American people without health insurance coverage rose to 46.6 million in 2005, accounting for 15.9 percent of the total population and up 1.3 million over 2004. Racial discrimination
-- White people's income was 64 percent more than the blacks and 40 percent more than the Hispanics.
-- Nearly one in five Hispanics lacked sufficient access to nutritious food and one in 20 regularly went hungry. Blacks took up 42 percent of all the homeless people in the United States.
-- The unemployment rate of the blacks was more than twice that of the whites: 8.6 percent for the blacks and 3.9 percent for the whites.
-- One out of 12 black men were in jail or prison, compared with one in 100 white men. Researchers pointed to poverty, a lack of opportunities, racism in the criminal justice system for the black-white prison gap.
-- The number of extreme racist and neo-Nazi organizations has increased by 33 percent in recent five years, rising from 672 in 2004 to 803 in 2005.

The Disadvantaged

-- The female-to-male earnings ratio was 76 percent in the United States with median earnings of women and men standing at about 32,000 and 42,000 U.S. dollars, respectively.
-- In 2005, 37 percent of the low-wage mothers had to give up necessary medical care, and a third had their electricity or phone turned off because they could not pay the bills.
-- During 2005, there were an estimated 93,934 female victims of forcible rape, or 62.5 out of every 100,000 women suffered from forcible rape.
-- Nearly 1.3 million American children who were homeless or fled home wandered in streets.
-- The U.S. Department of Justice received nearly 800,000 cases of missing children and kidnapping every year. And among the nearly 100 dangerous missing cases each year, about 40 percent of the missing children were killed eventually.
-- People with disabilities are nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than people without disabilities; 26 percent of people with disabilities had annual household income below 15,000 U.S. dollars, versus 9 percent those without disabilities.

Human Rights Abroad

-- More than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq since war started in March 2003, meaning about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.
-- Since August 2002, 98 prisoners had died in American-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the dead, 34 died of premeditated murder, 11 deaths were suspicious, and 8 to 12 were tortured to death.
-- In May 2006 human rights group Amnesty International condemned the detention of some 14,000 prisoners in Iraq without charge or trial.
-- A poll by the BBC World Service released on January 23, 2007showed that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world in the past year. Some 73 percent of the total disapproved of U.S. government's handling of the military campaign in Iraq, with 49 percent of respondents saying Washington was playing a mainly negative role internationally.
-- An average of only 29 percent of some 18,000 people surveyed in18 countries over the last three months believed that the United States is having a mainly positive influence internationally, down 7 percent from the previous poll conducted a year earlier.

Goodling Resigns

Monica M. Goodling, a top aide to Attorney general Alberto Gonzales and White House liason, has resigned. Goodling also vowed to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. It seems to me that Goodling would have no need to require this invocation if a crime wasn't committed. But since crimes were probably committed, Goodling is using this as a lever to extract immunity for her client in exchange for her testimony.

Finally, it's curious and disheartening how postions of power have flowed to people with such slender credentials. In another era, a person in Goodling's position would be expected to be on the law review from a flagship university with experience clerking in the Supreme Court and then perhaps another dozen years as a proscutor. But Goodling's alma mater is Messiah College and Pat Robertson's Regent. As is true with many people in the current adminsitration, her primary credential is the ideology and mediocrity of a zealot.

Disney Marries Mr. Smee and Captain Hook

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Starting at $8,000, Disney is now offering same-sex couples a fairy-land wedding, complete with a Cinderella coach and Disney characters mingling with the guests.




(I took this picture of Mr. Smee, Captain Hook, and a nose-picking Cinderella on the SS Disney Magic in 2004.)

I've always been impressed with Disney and I use the catch-phrase "Disney quality" to encourage my kids to do their very best. I'm sure likewise such wedding will also be Disney quality. But I do think that gay day events are pushing the envelope. As gay blogger Pete Werner writes, such displays have degenerated in recent years into "a vile spectacle of self-indulgence and indeceny."

"I can’t help but think of, and feel sorry for – the unsuspecting family who saved for years for a once in a lifetime trip – only to arrive and find that Disney had in fact, been invaded by he-women and shaved down muscle boys. By itself that would not be a problem, but the sheer number of people who seem to go out of their way to rub their sexuality in everyones face during this ‘event’ is nothing short of disgraceful. Is the Magic Kingdom REALLY the place for a 5 year old to ask his father why those two men are kissing? Is it really up to any person to decide for that parent when, or if, they will have that conversation with their child? I don’t like it when I hear pompous windbags telling me I’m going to burn in hell for being gay, and I’m sure most of the free world would appreciate a visit to Disney World that did not include the vision of grown men in go-go shorts, and ads for lubricant prominently displayed throughout the host hotel. "

I have to agree with Mr. Werner. There is everything wrong with that.

A Ship of Fools

In this week's National Review is a four-color advertisement for an Alaska cruise on the MS Noordham, with prices that start at $2,299 per person. Between poolside smokers and cocktail receptions are seminars by reactionary luminaries such as Dick Morris, Robert Bork, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Kate O'Beirne. Sounds like a voyage of the damned, so I'll take a pass.

Mitt Romney's Atheism

Of all the Republicans now running for the presidency, the one whose character impresses me the most is Mitt Romney, the former Governer of Massachusetts. McCain is a tragic figure, slouching his way to Gomorrah, forever a skeletal bridesmaid in the grim Bush-Iraq nuptials. Gulliani has no demonstrable understanding of world affairs other than to promise that his plan will be the Bush plan on steroids. On Fox, he promised to do to Pakistan what we have done to Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, Romney's political and business skills give him the star quality that could take him to the convention. His personal life is beyond reproach, the only leading Republican candidate to have married once. In an interview on CNN yesterday, I thought he was skilled in framing his religious background in more palatable terms for Catholic and Protestant watchers. Romney spoke of "spirituality" and "shared American values" rather than the religion of his great great grandfather Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt.

Time will tell whether or not this will work. A residual bigotry still lingers for those outside of the religious American mainstream. However, I'm not sure if claims to "spirituality"or "values" differs from that to which an atheist would profess. And perhaps that's a good thing.

Rabbi Marc Gellman, in Newsweek, discusses the question of whether God is real, and defines this question as a mystery in distinction to a problem. "Mysteries are not problems that have not yet been answered. "What is the cure for cancer?" is an unanswered problem,not a mystery, but the question of whether God is real or whethergoodness is rewarded or whether there is a purpose to human existence orwhy do fools fall in love or who put the bop in the bop sh-bopsh-bop-these are all mysteries and they will not go away and they will always be important and they will always define us by the way we answerthem with our lives and our hopes." The question of God's existence is at the bottom a mystery that cannot be proved with evidence that is outside of us. Rather, it "is resolved by the answer we give to it withour life. If a person believes that all human beings are made in theimage of God and thus deserve respect, then God is real for that personas the source of his or her transcendent duty to treat all people with love and respect. If, on the other atheist hand, people are just one of many species ruled by the survival of the fittest, then God does not exist for that person and neither does any transcendent duty to treat others with dignity."

Of course, Gellman's conclusions are nonsense. There are people who believe that God is real and that we are made in the image of God while cheerfully treating humans as the most expendable of objects. And, on the other hand, there are those who reject any belief in God while their values compel them to treat others with transcendent dignity. It is for this reason, speaking for myself, religious or non-religious self-definitions and creedal affirmations are not nearly as important as how people live their lives and the everyday ethical choices that they make.

You're In the Army Now

The raw data tells the story.

(Facts are from TIME's April 6th cover-story America's Broken-Down Army.)

1. Today, half the Army's 43 combat brigades are deployed overseas, with the remainder recovering from their latest deployment or preparing for the next one.

2. Those deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan more than once—170,000 so far—have a 50% increase in acute combat stress over those who have been deployed only once.

3. Next year's proposed $625 billion defense budget is the highest, adjusted for inflation, since World War II.

4. The Air Force continues to buy $330 million fighters, and the Navy $2 billion submarines.

5. The soldiers' change of heart is reflected in a poll by the independent Army Times. In December, for the first time, more troops surveyed disapproved of the President's handling of the war (42%) than approved of it (35%). Over the past two years, the number of troops surveyed who think victory is likely has fallen from 83% to 50%. Army suicides, an admittedly rough barometer of morale, show a steady increase, rising from 51 confirmed in 2001 to 91 (plus seven possible suicides still under investigation) last year. Desertions are climbing.

6. Recruits from the least-skilled category have climbed eightfold, to nearly 4%, over the past two years. Just 81% had high school diplomas last year, a sharp drop from 94% in 2003. The past two years have been the first in a decade in which the Army missed the Pentagon goal of 90% with diplomas. (The rest have GEDs.) The Army has boosted the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42—but 12% of recruits over 35 drop out within six months, double the rate for younger soldiers. To boost its numbers, the Army has had to cut its standards. It granted recruits nearly twice as many waivers for felonies and other personal shortcomings in 2006 as it did in 2003.

7. The Army will be at least 3,000 midlevel officers short through 2013 because of overly deep cuts made in the young officers' ranks a decade ago.

8. There were only 25,100 ROTC cadets last year, 6,000 shy of the target. The U.S. Military Academy generated 846 freshly minted 2nd lieutenants in 2006, 54 short of its goal.

9. The Army had only 32,000 sets of body armor when the Iraq war began. The Army said at the start of the war it would need 235 armored humvees; the number is 18,000 today.

10. Next year the Army is seeking a 19% budget hike, including a 55% rise in procurement dollars, to $130 billion.

An Iranian Win

The disappointment from the American right in the peaceful end of the Iranian hostage crisis is palpable. For example, John Bolton, the Bush administration's fromer UN ambassador, castigated the British government for its lack of resolve. There is little doubt that the administration would have preferred that this incident escalate if not into a shooting war at least into a protracted cold war. And the best way to do that, evidently, is to posture and to disengage-- the diplomatic equivalent of spoiled three-year old with her hands over her ears shouting "la la la la".

The ancient Iranians invented what we recognize today as the game of chess, although early forms of the game originate in India and other countries. One of the earliest literary reference to chess is found in the Persian book Karnamak-i Artaxshir-i Papakan, between the third and seventh century. Chess is a game of pure logic, where information is assumed to be equally available to both sides, where there is no bluffing, and where victory is determined on the last move. The Iranians played the hostage game like chess masters and won decisively, a conclusion I wish I didn't have to make as I consider Iran to be an exceeding dangerous country.

As in the Carter hostage crisis, the key mistake the British made, apart from the tactical errors that allowed for their capture, was to elevate the capture of the 15 sailors into a matter of national importance. This alone increased their price, as it were, allowing Iran to wring behind-the scenes concessions from Britain and the United States-- the release of a captured Iranian diplomat by Iraqi forces, the admission of violation of Iranian soveregn waters, and an agreement not to violate its borders again. In exchange, Iran gave nothing, but cultivated considerable goodwill in Europe and increased respect from its Middle Eastern neighbors for asserting its interests in the face of the British and U.S. naval forces. During the 1979-81 crisis, Iran released its hostages after 444 days, on the day that Ronald Reagan took office. I doubt that the Iranian government thought that Reagan would take immediate military action to free the hostages. Rather, as the administration changed hands, the price of the hostages dropped to zero as opportunities to further needle the Carter administration evaporated. Like rug hagglers, they played their final move at the most optimum time, effectively checkmating the Carter presidency.

One of Iran's goals is keep the United States embroiled in the Iraqi conflict while they continue to develop a nuclear offensive capacity. And why not, so long as the United States has declared a national policy of regime change and preemptive war. The bluffing and go-for-broke Texas-hold-'em poker that the Bush administration has employed cannot work in the case of Iran, for Iran will counter such techniques with its diplomatic grandmaster chess playing skills. A good example of that is the apparent leverage that Syria played in resolving the standoff, that coincided with the visit of House Speaker Pelosi. The Syrian Information Minsiter Mohsen Bilal said that "Syrian efforts culminated with the release of the British sailors." Maybe not. I also somehow doubt that Pelosi's entreaties had much to do with the situation. But Syria is a rook that Iran is using to check the United States, and Pelosi perhaps was also an Iranian pawn, due in no small part to the singular incompetence, incoherence, and ineffectiveness of U.S. diplomatic policy in the Middle East.

Walk Ins Welcomed

Thanks to our home equity loan, I was able to top off my Nissan's gas tank at the local On the Run convenience store/Mobil depot. Nearby was a Salon Boutique with a sign "Walk ins Welcomed". The proprietors were clearly trying to attract customers who didn't want to make reservations. But it still seemed to be a quirky sign, suggesting that crawl ins or run ins or limp ins or cartwheeling ins were emphatically prohibited.

The Hounding of Foxie

The White House released a statement
yesterday withdrawing Sam Fox for consideration as "ambassador extraordinary and plenipotiary" to Belgium.

Fox (or "Foxie" as the prez calls him), donated $1,220,057.18 to the Republican cause, including $200,000 for the Bush 2004 re-election and $50,000 to help fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that attacked Senator John Kerry's service during the Viet Nam War. When Kerry asked Fox who asked him to donate the money, he couldn't remember-- an affliction that seems to afflict this administration. At least Gonzo and Scooter have the malady.

Here is part of the transcript to Fox's confirmation hearing.

But today Bush named Fox as ambassador using his recess appointment power. This means that Foxie will remain ambassador until the end of Bush's presidency. I'm sure the Flemish and Walloons of Belgium will be excited to know that not only is the United States getting represented by a political hack of the first water but also by a liar and a fool as well.

Should We Humanize or Demonize?

It is perhaps not a spring-time thought that someday our graveyard will now longer be remembered. There is much to be said for living in the present and not becoming overly concerned over what politicians and preachers have to say to us. The recent news of the cancers that are challenging Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, political partisans on different sides of the aisle, reminds us of our own mortality and that our own days are numbered. I nevertheless think it is appropriate not to pull our rhetorical punches when it comes to talking about current policies and events. Whatever feelings we may have to them at the human level, politicans are neverthless making decisions that will influence our lives and the lives of our children and community.

Rove Still Isn't Hip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWRSgjDEQy0&mode=related&search=

Pieces of Eight

Random Observations.

1. Some scientists cannot believe in God but do believe in something that they cannot demonstrate called "dark matter" that occupies, they say, most of the universe.

2. Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach and most recently I Am a Strange Loop, speculates that the essence of another loved one can be imported in your own brain so that their soul's essence persists in your mind after their death.

3. I don't think Geroge Bush is in a bubble. It's more like a blister-pack clamshell-- those hard-to-open plastic packages that fossilize products to prevent people from stealing them.

4. Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), heir to the Cunard shipping fortune, grew up in a home bigger than the New York Public Library and died destitute after an extended alcoholic binge in Paris.