Closing argument

For all the spending, talk, debates, events, phonecalls, etc., I fear that, at the end, Barak Obama has failed to make a convincing case to America for why he should be elected President. Which is not the same as saying he won’t be elected. John McCain seems to have hit on his closing argument – not the experience angle, but the “don’t let the Dems control the government or they’ll raise your taxes whatever they promise now” argument. It may not be true, but it’s believable.

So here’s my contribution to the Obama campaign for a clinching final argument. If we elect John McCain, all the dastardly misdeeds of the last eight years – and who can doubt that they are legion? - will never see the light of day and the perps will never get their just punishment.

It’s enough to convince me.

Social Darwinism

There’s a great deal to be said for reading Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. It’s a captivating travelogue, occasionally an adventure story and a chronicle of times past. Of course, it’s most remarkable for Darwin’s insights into the geology and biology of regions he is seeing for the first time and which he is often able to read in ways that others of his time could not, and that most educated people today could not. How many of us take time from our travels to collect every insect that lives in a new place? How many of us even know enough biology recognize what might be interesting? Darwin, at age 25-30 knew more about the world than most of us ever will as long as we live. Plus he had the ability to reject the common wisdom of the wise men of his age.

All of that becomes even more remarkable when you realize that Darwin was profoundly conservative and Anglo-centric in his social awareness. “To hoist the British flag," he wrote, "seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity and civilization.” Time and again he judges the natives harshly from the narrow viewpoint of an English gentleman. The Fuegans, the Maori, even the Tahitians are described by Darwin in almost subhuman terms born of racial prejudice and social arrogance. Of the Fuegans (natives of Tierra del Fuego) he wrote: "These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skin filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world.” Ironically, many of his harshest judgments are rendered from the certainty of his Christian faith. Ironic because, of course, the more curious and adventurous part of Darwin’s mind eventually led him to doubt, and many would say reject his Christian upbringing.

Time to end the other war


Budget cutting? Take a hatchet to the war on drugs, writes Joe Conason in this column in Slate.


Every year we throw away billions on a failed program to punish addicts -- an approach both candidates should know doesn't work. Today we spend well over $50 billion annually at the federal, state and local levels on a domestic war that has never achieved any of its objectives and never will. If either of the presidential candidates still believes that this is a worthwhile investment of our money, despite his own experience, it would be fascinating to hear him explain why.

How much money is that? In our new big-number currency, it come to 150 Iraq-Days. Or if you prefer, $500 per American household. That's a lot of DARE shirts! And it doesn't count all the lives wasted in prison, all the cops who could be out fighting crime, all the other crime that gets financed or fueled by the high price of drugs or the subversion of entire foreign governments by either gangs or terrorists who grow fat on American drug money.

How Reagan became a liberal

Frank Rich has a scary column called The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama that raises the issue of how violent and vigilante the Republican party has become.

McCain campaign recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

This wing of the party of course feels like there's no recourse but hatred and violence because they have learned over the past 20 years to take their cause as a moral mission -- the rise of the better people vs the lazy and shiftless masses -- the patriots of the dollar bill -- the carriers of the true cross, namely that government is the enemy always and everywhere.

Liberals will always be at a disadvantage because at the core of liberalism is the openness to new ideas and the willingness to consider the other's point of view. When you already know the absolute truth, there is no need to consider any other ideas, or even to tolerate those who hold them.

They chant Ronald Reagan's name as a mantra, but his politics would be too liberal today for most of this group.

Palinesque

I haven’t written about Sarah Palin since the convention (OK, I haven’t written about much of anything since the convention due to other factors in my life with a higher priority than blogging), but I was glad to see Steven Pinker’s column Everything You Heard Is Wrong this week because I think everyone has paid entirely too much attention to the Palin phenomenon, as if we all finally got to be judges on American Idol rather than American voters, and far too little about what she actually believes and stands for beyond the winks and nods. Mr. Pinker – oft accused of being in the conservative camp – apparently agrees. Said he:

“Voters judging Ms. Palin’s performance should focus on the facile governing philosophy that is symbolized by her speech style, not the red herrings of accent or dialect.”

That said, I have found the newly coined term “Palinesque” useful over the past few weeks. Not least to describe GW Bush’s flacid attempts at explaining the financial crisis & bailout. It shows that it really is useful to have a leader in times of trouble and also why it’s a bad idea for a president to lie. Did anyone believe a word he said last week? Did he? Or had someone simply propped him up and fed him the lines he was to say regardless of the meaning or relevance– a la Palin at the debate. He was reduced to repeating his bravo performance ante the Iraq war, only this time replacing the mushroom cloud reference with a parallel reference to the Great Depression. And, what do you know, it worked.

Now my real theory of Sarah Palin is that she was not chosen to appeal to women or independents or even blue collar white men. She is a NeoCon parasite implanted in the soft body of the McCain campaign not to save it, but to destroy McCain forever as a serious player in the GOP and to launch her own career as the NeoCon standard bearer of 2012. Time will tell if the strategy is successful (although Part I seems to be well underway). The problem I guess they didn’t consider is that the parasite has emerged bloody-fanged from the husk of the McCain campaign in full public view while still in her larval stage. That hasn’t been too pretty.

Why no blogs?

Let's see. Sarah mania. Market collapse, McCain channels Carl Rove, Hurricanes blow away Texas, Canoeing the Wis. River where it's barely a trickle, Van Hollen tries to steal the election in broad daylight. There's lots to blog. Plus reading Chas Darwin is always such a treat. But sometimes your brain just gets clogged up with too much stuff to actually blog. I hope to get back at it soon.

A thought for 9-11

Reprinted here in full because it's worth reading again on every 9-11

December 9, 2001
Ask Not What . . .

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
News anchor Tom Brokaw tells the story of meeting a young New York City fireman a week after Sept. 11. The fireman had just participated in a memorial service for some of his fallen colleagues and the two of them talked about the tragedy. ''As I said goodbye,'' Mr. Brokaw recalled, ''he grabbed my arm and his expression took on a tone of utter determination as he said, 'Mr. Brokaw, watch my generation now, just watch us.' '' As the author of the acclaimed ''The Greatest Generation,'' the story of the World War II cohort that saved America from Nazism, Mr. Brokaw told me he knew just what the man was saying: '' 'This is our turn to be a greatest generation.' ''

There is a lot of truth to that. I have nothing but respect for the way President Bush has conducted this war. But this moment cannot just be about moving troops and tracking terrorists. There is a deep hunger in America post-Sept. 11 in many people who feel this is their war in their backyard and they would like to be summoned by the president to do something more than go shopping. If you just look at the amount of money spontaneously donated to victims' families, it's clear that there is a deep reservoir of energy out there that could be channeled to become a real force for American renewal and transformation -- and it's not being done. One senses that President Bush is intent on stapling his narrow, hard-right Sept. 10 agenda onto the Sept. 12 world, and that is his and our loss.

Imagine if tomorrow President Bush asked all Americans to turn down their home thermostats to 65 degrees so America would not be so much of a hostage to Middle East oil? Trust me, every American would turn down the thermostat to 65 degrees. Liberating us from the grip of OPEC would be our Victory Garden.

Imagine if the president announced a Manhattan Project to make us energy independent in a decade, on the basis of domestic oil, improved mileage standards and renewable resources, so we Americans, who are 5 percent of the world's population, don't continue hogging 25 percent of the world's energy? Imagine if the president called on every young person to consider enlisting in some form of service -- the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Peace Corps, Teach For America, AmeriCorps, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.? People would enlist in droves. Imagine if the president called on every corporate chieftain to take a 10 percent pay cut, starting with himself, so fewer employees would have to be laid off? Plenty would do it.

I don't toss these ideas out for some patriotic high. There is a critical strategic point here: If we are going to be stomping around the world wiping out terrorist cells from Kabul to Manila, we'd better make sure that we are the best country, and the best global citizens, we can be. Otherwise, we are going to lose the rest of the world.

That means not just putting a fist in the face of the world's bad guys, but also offering a hand up for the good guys. That means doubling our foreign aid, intensifying our democracy promotion programs, increasing our contributions to world development banks (which do microlending to poor women) and lowering our trade barriers for textile and farm imports from the poorest countries. Imagine if the president called on every U.S. school to raise money to buy solar-powered light bulbs for every village in Africa that didn't have electricity so African kids could read at night? And let every one of those light bulbs carry an America flag decal on it, so when those kids grew up they would remember who lit up their nights?

The world's perception of us and our values matters even more now, and it is not going to be changed by an ad campaign, or by just winning in Afghanistan, as important as that is. It will be changed only by what we do -- at home and abroad. This war can't end with only downtown Kabul on the mend, and not downtown Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Remember: the victims on Sept. 11 were a cross section of America -- black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor and middle class -- and that same cross section has to share in the healing. If we've learned anything from Sept. 11, it is that if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you.

The first Greatest Generation won its stripes by defending America and its allies. This Greatest Generation has to win its stripes by making sure that the America that was passed onto us, and that now claims for itself the leadership of a global war against evil terrorists, is worthy of that task.

Mr. President, where do we enlist?

Reading Maraniss; thinking of 9-11

Most people who pick up David Maraniss’ new book, Rome 1960, probably will read it as a stirring saga of sports, or possibly as a time capsule of a more innocent time when TV sports didn’t dominate our lives and our 155 channels, or even as a reminder that Jim Crow and institutional racism are not that far in our past. I am sure Dave meant it to be all of those things; he never writes simple stories.

But for me this book brought back vivid memories of the Cold War – most appropriate memories on this eve of 9-11. For those whose memories have faded – or who are too young to remember – those were times of dread, when the threat of the imminent destruction of “the world as we know it” was never far in the background.

I had a flashback to those times on Sunday when visiting some friends who live in an old commercial building. Their basement ceiling is heavy steel I-beams and the walls are lined with deep shelves, which they now use as a kind of pantry and wine cellar. The thought came to me out of nowhere, “this would be a good bomb shelter.” I was reminded of the days when we had bomb shelters. Some of us did. I just had an outline on the basement floor where I wished my parents would build a regulation bomb shelter. Some friends had the real thing complete with radios and batteries and disaster supplies, and probably a shotgun.

In those days we had a real enemy. Not an enemy who flew planes into buildings or bombed subway trains. An enemy who could destroy us in 30 minutes. Not just kill some of us, but turn the vast majority or Americans into dust or vapor and make the survivors wish they’d been so lucky. We fought that war partly with military preparedness, partly with surrogate wars (a strategy culminating in its last mad apogee of Viet Nam), and partly – mostly – in a war of words. It was a war for the hearts and minds of the people of the whole world. We were in a war of ideas and it mattered whose idea won. That’s what Dave is writing about in Rome 1960. It mattered who won Gold in the 1960 Olympics because that was a surrogate for the real war going on.

Contrast that with the attitude of the current administration, illustrated by this story in the NYTimes: 9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.

This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.

That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism —the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

The arrogance of Bush & Cheney & their gang has allowed our adversaries to wield this most powerful of weapons against us. Rather than seek to use public opinion as a lever to fight extremism, they have thumbed their noses at the moderates, the thoughtful people, the ones who really would like to believe in America. You can almost hear Dick Cheney harrumph at the very notion that the opinion of ordinary people might be considered in the halls of the mighty. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun, he might say, thus joining hands with Chairman Mao in the ultimate left-right gesture of solidarity.

There was a lot wrong with the way the U.S. fought the Cold War. McCarthyism didn’t end with Joe McCarthy; it seeped into every City Council and Legislative race in the country. Rights were violated in the name of national security just as they are violated today. The attack phrase, “Why do liberals hate America?” was born in those days, Rush just revived it.

But the nation also had the courage to not only face down a really scary foe, but to also transform American civil life through the civil rights act, voting rights act, Title IX and other women’s right’s laws, various environmental protection laws, etc. etc.

I wonder if Americans, who face a much less immediate enemy today with vastly less killing power than the old USSR, still have the courage to elect someone like John F. Kennedy, young inexperienced, idealistic and a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholic prejudice ran deep and strong. Do we still have the faith in ourselves to elect someone who can not only lead America, but lead the world? Do we still think the world matters, or have we crawled so deep into our bunkers that we can no longer see the sunrise?

On this eve of 9-11, it might be instructive to revisit the bad old days – by reading Rome 1960 or any other means you choose – to remember what America has lost since those days and what we might regain.

Knee-jerk reaction(ary)

Sometimes you have to wonder who’s smoking dope, the dopers or the legislators who nearly jump out of their pants in horror when anyone gets high. Their knee-jerk reaction can be summed up as, if it’s fun, ban it. NYT 9-09-2008 Salvia’s Popularity May Thwart Medical Use http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/us/09salvia.html

I haven’t gotten high (except naturally on sunshine and fresh air) for so many years I can’t remember. (hmmm . Drug-related memory loss?) And I’m not saying getting high is good. There are obvious dangers both for the drugger and the public. But this evangelical enthusiasm for making everything possible illegal (except alcohol of course) is madness and ultimately causes way more problems that it solves. Here’s a bit of the Times story:

Pharmacologists who believe salvia could open new frontiers for the treatment of addiction, depression and pain fear that its criminalization would make it burdensome to obtain and store the plant, and difficult to gain government permission for tests on human subjects. In state after state, however, including here in Texas, the YouTube videos have become Exhibit A in legislative efforts to regulate salvia. This year, Florida made possession or sale a felony punishable by 15 years in prison. California took a gentler approach by making it a misdemeanor to sell or distribute to minors.

“When you see it, well, it sure makes a believer out of you,” said Representative Charles Anderson of Waco, a Republican state lawmaker who is sponsoring one of several bills to ban salvia in Texas.

Anderson couldn’t be more wrong. We should be moving the other way – toward making more things legal.

A guy from Waco should know better. Half the economy of Mexico is drug running and half the government there is on the take. In some countries it’s worse. It’s all because the US insists on making drugs illegal and therefore incredibly profitable. Naturally that profit turns up in the hands of government officials and, incidentally, bankrolls terrorist and guerrilla groups all over the world. Which we then spend US tax dollars to fight. The world’s biggest and most lucrative make-work program and we the taxpayers get to pay for it.

DARE to say no to illegal drugs. Make ‘em legal. The Times story concludes:

Though states are moving quickly, Bertha K. Madras, a deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said federal regulators remained in a quandary. “The risk of any drug that is intoxicating is high,” Dr. Madras said. “You’re one car ride away from an event that could be life-altering. But in terms of really good studies, there is just very little. So what do you do? How do you make policy in the absence of good hard cold information?”

If you’re a legislator and you’ve got the twitchy knee, you make it illegal.

Beautiful blog

It's the nature of blogs to be random thoughts sparked by the events of the day -- or as is often the case of the drinking and reading society -- words on the page. Rarely do we get to see a blog that is just beautiful, not just in the thoughts expressed - some blogs do wax lyrical - but also in the presentation. So trust Linda Brazill, the former features editor at The Capital Times, to create a blog that makes you just want to sigh with peace and pleaure when you open the page. I recommend each_little_world even if you are not a gardener. It even makes the blogosphere a more beautiful place.

Underwhelmed

I was prepared for a smart, tough, appealing and witty Sarah Palin. Instead I heard my 5th grade teacher reading a speech clearly written by a team of highly partisan speechwriters who didn't really know her. In many places it was nothing more than a series of clever attack lines pasted together. I was hoping for more.

Measuring in Iraq-Days

As I have been listening to the Republican convention and hearing about how healthcare reform will cost too much or solving the energy crisis will cost too much, I am reminded of a meeting I was at several months ago where the subject of high speed rail came up as a means of saving on energy costs. As I recall, the estimated cost of a line from Chicago to Minneapolis was about $800 million, and everyone in the room nodded gravely as the presenter explained that such a bucket of money was clearly out of the realm of possibility.

Millions. Billions. Who has any concept of what that means?

But since the subject of Iraq also keeps coming up at the Republican convention (something about keeping America safe, I think), it occurred to me that the two subjects could be better explained by creating a new unit of currency – the Iraq-Day. Estimates of Iraq war expenditure rates range from $8 billion per month by the Congressional Research Service, to $12 billion a month by economist Joseph Stiglitz. So let’s make the math easy and call it $10 billion. So one Iraq-Day = $333 million. (10,000,000,000/30).

That makes it easier to understand the cost of high-speed rail from Chicago to Minneapolis. It’s 2.4 Iraq-Days. Minus the cost of jet fuel or gasoline. I’ll bet you can think of more things that could be measured in Iraq-Days.

For Anonymous

Anonymous asked for my opinion of the Dem convention and it has taken me a while to decide what I think. I’m not one of those bloggers who just pukes up whatever is on my mind and throws it on the screen. And I'm just not clever enough to think of just the right thing right away. That’s why this will never be a world famous blog.

Two impressions. The convention and Obama’s speech. The convention was pretty conventional. We heard the expected messages in the expected way from the expected players. Not that the content was bad. I was impressed by the stories of ordinary people and their struggles. Al Gore was thoughtful and serious. But in this age of social networking, 24/7 communications, YouTube, etc., the convention was pretty much a bunch of talking heads, many of them shouting at the crowd like Fighting Bob LaFollette had to do 100 years ago from the bed of a hay wagon. We have microphones now folks.

I wasn’t watching the TV when Obama came on, but from the audio only he seemed nervous and out of synch. He eventually got into the “policy” part of the speech before winding it up with an emotional call for change. He got better as he went along. My initial reaction, however, was that between the specific policy announcements – healthcare, environment, tax cut, war, etc., and the “change coming TO Washington,” Obama failed to paint a picture of the America he would like to see. Yes we should have job security, energy security, healthcare, justice and all that, but how do you achieve such a society and how might it work? I would have liked to hear about that.

But – this is why I didn’t write immediately – that was just one person’s reaction. In the following days I learned that, by leaving the canvas blank in critical places, Obama had invited listeners to fill in their own impressions, desires and goals. Everyone heard something different in the speech. Everyone brought their own ideas and heard them in Obama’s words. So maybe that’s the genius of his approach. If there are enough people with the right dreams.

I was a little disappointed – but probably shouldn’t be – that Obama still didn’t issue a call to action that goes beyond electing him prez. Realistically, the forces of reaction – including Democratic special interests – will still be there after November and will gradually take back whatever they have lost in the tsunami of the election – if there is a tsunami. What will the people on the floor of the convention do about that? How will Obama rally them from complacency and doubt in 12 months, 24 months or more when he needs them to put the heat on Congress? Yes, change has to come from the bottom up, but change needs a bold leader who will ask “what can you do for your country?”

Heavy blog

There's a lot of lightweight stuff in the blogosphere and a lot of madness, but it's also possible to find some provocative thinking. Here's a new blog called Evolutionary Psychology from Allen MacNeill, who teaches biology at Cornell. Here's a brief sample from one of his recent posts about the role of religion in warfare:

if natural selection acts at the level of individuals, how can natural selection result in a propensity to participate in warfare? Clearly, either the probability that one will be killed must be perceived as low or the potential payoff from such participation must be perceived as high. If natural selection is to operate at the level of individuals, these two circumstances should ideally be obtained simultaneously,

Here is where the capacity for religious experience is crucial. By making possible the belief that a supernatural entity knows the outcome of all actions and can influence such outcomes, that one's "self" (i.e., "soul") is not tied to one's physical body, and that if one is killed in battle, one's essential self (i.e., soul) will go to a better "place" (e.g., heaven, valhalla, etc.) the capacity for religious experience can tip the balance toward participation in warfare. By doing so, the capacity for religious belief not only makes it possible for individuals to do what they might not otherwise be motivated to do, it also tends to tip the balance toward victory on the part of the religiously devout participant. This is because success in battle, and success in war, hinges on commitment: the more committed a military force is in battle, the more likely it is to win, all other things being equal.

The post is quite long and involved, so if you want to follow up, you can go to evolutionarypsychology.blogspot.com

Who loves Sarah Palin?

John McCain has stunned the pundits by selecting Sarah Palin for vice president. But other than her youth, inexperience and isolation from national politics, Palin is a brilliant choice not because she will attract Hillary votes or resonate with women, but because she's a creature of the Republican base -- anti-abortion, anti-environment, pro-oil -- right down the line a hard right conservative. Just the kind of person John McCain has been having trouble raising either money or enthusiasm from. Palin secures the right so McCain can move to the middle. All the punditry about her being an outsider or being a ploy to bring over disaffected Clinton voters is missing the point. This is a choice born of weakness and desperation. McCain sacrificed any shred of plausibility (commander in chief-wise) to shore up the crumbling right. Don't believe me? Check the right wing bloggers like hotair.com; they love Palin.

What makes a guy

One of the Drinking & Reading Society’s favorite scientists (can one have a favorite scientist?) just came out with another interesting finding.

Sean Carroll, a UW-Madison molecular biologist, has at least shed light on what happens at the genetic level to make males and females of any species look so different. Though the work was done by studying markings on fruit flies, the same genetic mechanism is likely responsible for the male moose having big antlers, male lions having impressive manes, and male peacocks having those long and showy tail feathers. In humans, the process could help explain how men end up being larger than women. And hairier.

You can see the whole story “What makes a guy a guy?” in the Wisconsin State Journal.

What I want to know is what makes little boys love trucks, young guys love sports with balls and all guys love beer & pizza?

An Environmental Hero

Heroes are not reasonable fellows. They do what they do because they see things differently from ordinary folks. Maybe they see things more clearly. And it's in their nature to take action when the opportunity presents.

These things come to mind because we went to the Sierra Club's farewell party for Bruce Nilles at which he was justly feted for doing some incredible heavy lifting on the issues of air pollution, global warming and coal power. To us and the other folks in that room, Bruce is clearly a hero and deserves to be.

But to others, he is not. Wednesday there appeared a nasty blog by a guy named Rich Trzupek, an industry apologist who is a pretty knowledgeable about pollution but who has let himself go straight over the edge in frustration and, I suspect, envy, in a completely outrageous personal attack on Bruce. Blogs like that are one of the things wrong with the world these days. You can google it; I won't give the link 'cause it seems too much like smut.

Bruce Nilles is an environmental hero and Mark Trzupek is not because heroes don't care about being reasonable, or making compromises, or measuring progress little by little. We need reasonable people and progress in fact does get made little by little. But the world would be a sad, gray place if we were all Mark Trzupek. We need the Bruce Nilles of the world even when they are unreasonable or difficult - even when they are wrong. (And he's not wrong on this!) This quote from Maurice Maeterlinck's Our Social Duty says it better than I can.

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight which nature drags along.

Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the depths of the hold. They were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts where they will collect the winds of space.

The fruits of his labor

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A gunman entered the Arkansas Democratic Party headquarters Wednesday and shot the party chairman, who was hospitalized in critical condition, authorities said.

I'll bet this news item won't show up on Rush Limbaugh, just like the Unitarian Church shooting in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago didn't make the cut for Limbaugh's trenchent commentary. Hmmm. Violence directed against those dreadful liberals who stay awake at night dreaming about ways to steal your freedom, your guns and your money, and plot at every moment to destroy our precious traditional values is just a matter of a few nutcases, nothing to worry about, folks. Now let's get back to more hate speech.

No comment needed

WASHINGTON — The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops.

The Bell tolls for McCain

Recently John McCain confessed to a reporter that his favorite book – his guiding light – is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. A great book, but the insight it provides into McCain’s character ain’t so great.

In a surface reading of the book, it’s easy to assume that Robert Jordan sacrifices himself at the end in a hyper-romantic bid to help his newfound lover Maria escape, and/or from his anti-fascist principles. There is much to admire about Jordan's bravery and commitment to the anti-fascist cause, but it is his sacrifice at the end that is the defining moment and no doubt is what attracts McCain to the book. But there's a darkness in his decision that I'm not sure McCain can see.

Jordan makes a conscious decision to put himself in harm’s way, not to advance the cause or aid Maria, but because he’s just damn dead tired of fighting and wondering why. The fateful decision to cross the road under cannon fire at intervals rather than all together was certain to give the fascists time to zero in on the last rider – Jordan. If they had all gone at once, they would have been away before the tank gunner could get the range.

Hemingway gave us the key to Jordon’s decision in a conversation with the partisan leader Pablo:

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?"

Pablo’s fear and ambivalence ultimately seep into Jordan’s heart and fuel his fateful decision - perhaps the only decision that would make sense to someone who could not live with his romanticism, but didn't know how to give it up.

Personal bravery and a willingness to put the country's cause first are admirable in any case, and we have seen much of that from our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have just suffered through eight years of a romantic commander in chief. I’m ready for some realism an I'm ready for a president who can tell the difference.

Two turntables and a microphone

I went to the opening of the Obama office in Madison Sunday. Wall to wall crowd standing in the sweatbox heat and everyone having a good time. It was actually a cross section. There were the usual pols and the usual fresh faced and earnest student coordinators, but the vast majority were middle age, middle class homeowner types who didn't need to be there on a Sunday afternoon. Actually Gov. Jim Doyle called it just right when he said this is the election we have all been waiting for, possibly the most exciting moment in politics since Kennedy. That seemed to be the motivation for many in the throng.

Doyle, incidentally, has come a long way from his stiff and stumbling speaking style of 6 or 7 years ago. Sunday he was relaxed and funny and hit just the right notes. And the cool part was the music was provided by a DJ spinning disks. Jazz, techno, whatever. He had a microphone but didn't use it; probably just as well. But the music was good and the thought was even better.

It's enough to give a guy some hope.

Mislead by philosophy

Darwin wasn't just concerned with the physical world, but in the tradition of philosophy going back to Plato, his real theme was the nature of reality. Countless "philosophers" had gone around and around on the nature of God, exhausting not only themselves and the limits of "reason", but thousands of bleary eyed readers who probably came away shaking their heads and wondering if they were too stupid or if all that reasoning just didn't add up. Unfortunately, many of them decided it was their own failing that they didn't understand.

So Darwin asked the philosophical question, "does it make sense that God would have individually created and destroyed all these species, or is it more rational that God allowed them to be created and destroyed by some secondary cause?" His choice of "secondary cause" is at the root of the dispute about evolution vs creation.

As if anyone could figure out the mind of God by means of reason. Such an arrogant creature is man.

In illustration, I will close with this story from James McGrath's blog exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com. I always find something of interest there.

A man finds himself before the pearly gates of heaven, having just died quite suddenly and unexpectedly. St. Peter meets him. "Welcome, friend!" he says, "Would you like to come in?" The man says that he doesn't yet feel any different, and asks what will change when he goes through the gates. St. Peter explains to him, "You'll be given a fresh start. Since your past would inevitably influence your ongoing existence in countless negative ways, we will erase all your memories. Since the form in which you existed as a human being was frail and fallible, your body will be replaced by a glorious one incapable of sin or error."

The man looked at St. Peter puzzled. "If you do all that to me," he asked, "in what sense will I still me me?"

"Good question," answered St. Peter. "This new self will still have your name and will incorporate those few elements in your prior existence that were in no way, shape or form entangled with the sin, suffering, and other miseries of human existence."

"You know what," the man replied, looking around at the clouds and seeing that there were other people who were outside the pearly gates, "I think I'll pass. What you are offering would negate the value of everything I've ever learned, everything I've suffered, everything I've done - in short, everything I am!" And at that, he walked away.

St. Peter watched the man until he was out of sight. Then he looked up and said to God "Still no takers."

"They make me so proud of them, sometimes," came the cheerful booming voice of God from above.
St. Peter then went away too, to watch Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind...

Do unto others?

The Justice Dept hiring scandal revealed in the past week of course comes as no shock. We all knew that was going on, didn’t we? It was only the so-called shrill, liberal mainstream media who maintained their silence all these years until the tide finally went out so far on the Bush Admin that even a beaten dog could find the courage to howl just a little. But that’s not the point.

The question is what are “we” going to do about it? In sports, if you play with an ineligible player, you forfeit the game. But there’s no commish in this game. No instant replay.

So when the Obamans come marching in next winter, the question is will “we” behave the same way and load up those same positions with our people? Or will we allow the Bush team to keep the gains they made with 12 men on the field? The former makes all of the change rhetoric sound suspiciously like a lie. The latter makes us just a bunch of chumps waiting to be taken advantage of by the self-righteous chest-thumpers on the extreme right who actually doesn’t see that they did anything wrong.

Call me a wimp, but I'm hoping we can have the courage to follow the latter course.

Gas is 1.3 minutes cheaper this week.

Two numbers converged last week have been the subject of outrage in different quarters. The price of gasoline finally started coming down. I saw $3.89 this weekend. Nationally the price fell below $4. It will be interesting to see whether that's the new benchmark for outrage and whether we will now be content to pay anything below $4. Incidentally, I'm betting on $5 by next Memorial Day.

The second number was the federal minimum wage, which reached the height of $6.55 per hour (incidentally eclipsing Wisconsin's $6.50). There were the usual stories about what a terrible burden that will be on small businesses. Of course, any minimum wage or child labor law is a burden on small business and you would be surprised how many people would like to see both of those impositions repealed.

But for now it's worth contemplating that it only takes 35.6 minutes of work at the minimum wage to pay for a gallon of gas this week versus 36.9 minutes last week. I guess that's what passes for progress these days.

If you drive a gas hog, you actually have to work longer at the minimum wage to buy a gallon of gas than it takes to burn it. My truck gets 15 mpg. At 55 mph, it would take a bit more than 16 minutes to burn a gallon of gas. A gas miser is better, but doesn't give much satisfaction. My Passat averages 33 mpg, which means I could drive for 36 minutes at 55 mph, just a few second more than the time it would take to pay for the gas at $6.55 per hour.

And you wonder why Americans seem depressed these days.

Deep thoughts

Do you ever come across a thought that makes you go hmmmmm? This is from Human Goodness by Yi-Fu Tuan.

"We rarely consider the good things that come our way as unjust."

Sense and sensibility

Tenzin Gyatso. the 14th Dalai Lama, tends to present his “advice for living” not as a religious precept, but as common sense, or more often science. He made much of the fact that humans are “social animals” and are therefore dependent on others for their happiness.

All true as far as that goes, but when we came home we noticed that Kid, the older of the two colts, had a big lump on his back – no doubt from being bitten. Susan surmises the culprit was Waldo the pony and the casus belli was jealousy. Whatever the cause, it’s not the only time Kid has taken a knock, or the only time any of the horses has turned up with hoof rash or worse.

That got me thinking about social animals like herd animals, pack animals etc. Stuff goes on out in the pasture that would end up in the police report if they were humans.

But whether domesticated or not, all animals have a code of conduct and a way of resolving conflicts that is understood in the group, and which admits to change, testing and sometimes outright violation. It’s universal and it’s innate. So the Dalai Lama is smart to talk about right behavior being a matter of sense and science, not received wisdom. Unless someday we find the Book of Equus in an earthen jar in the desert somewhere. Then we’ll have to reconsider.

Lama Rama

We spent part of yesterday afternoon listening to Tenzin Gyatso. the 14th Dalai Lama give one of homely little lectures on how to be happy. He has a genial, aw-shucks attitude that makes him seem like a Tibetan Garrison Kiellor, especially when it came to the Q&A time at the end. The questions ranged from political – China in Tibet – to existential – “is there a beginning and an end?” – to woeful “What should I do with my life?” The answers could have come from Ann Landers, with a Buddhist twist. Things going wrong in your life? Try to rise above your worries? Can’t stop worrying? Blame karma – maybe it was something you did in a past life.

I’m sure people who have to deal with him as the titular head of state for Tibet or as a religious leader don’t see him as harmless and kind-hearted. He has to do some rough stuff sometimes, as the protesters outside reminded us. Any time you combine bureaucracy (material world) and religion (world of the non-rational) there will be conflict. That’s why there are hundreds of so-called Christian religions. It reminds us once again that founding a nation on “religious principles” isn’t such a good idea. In fact, I was happy to hear the Lama say that ethics, good behavior and the pursuit of happiness are just as much the province of reason and secular beliefs as of religion.

Not so simple

I was reading Nicholas Wade’s paean to E.O. Wilson (who deserves it, after all) in the NYT Science Section when this caught my eye:

When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

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

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

It’s worth reading the whole story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.html?ref=science&pagewanted

A point common to both the Wilson story – which focused on his theories of “social evolution,” (which irks the evolutionists like Dawkins who believes that the gene is everything in evolution) and the one above is the tendency of human nature to select one fact above all others and say that’s the explanation for everything. Whether it’s evolution or animal rights – or darn near anything else from traffic to marriage – the real reasons for why things are the way they are usually are much more subtle and various than any theory can account for.

So whether we’re reading Wilson or Genesis, it’s probably a good idea to approach the text as a kind of libretto. You can understand the outlines of the story, but you won’t understand the opera until you hear the aria.

Neglecting the blog

Maybe you noticed that the last couple of posts have been short and kind of far between.  Blame that on vacation.  I was on the beach and had very limited access to the Internet.  The beach in Door County was pretty good this year.  Not too stinky from the geese. Not too much crud in the water. Not too many weeds growing right up to the water's edge. A good place to sit and read. Beach reading for me consisted of Patriot Battles, Michael Stephenson's technical, but very well written account of how the Americans won the War for Independence, and The Courtier and the Heretic, Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart. There's nothing like a cup of coffee and a book about philosophy on the beach to start a summer day off right.

A visit from Aristotle's Witnesses

This is mostly funny because we used to get visits from people like this all the time. There was the guy who pulled up one Saturday morning in his SUV as I was heading out to burn the prairie.  I had the truck loaded up and a crew of half a dozen standing about waiting for instructions and this guy was oblivious. He could think of nothing but himself and his burning need to tell the world how just gosh-darn right he was about everything.  He didn't ask how I was doing or what I was up to, or why all these folks were standing around.  He dived right in and once he had ascertained that, yes, I did read the Bible, he whipped out his copy and invited me to read Matthew Chapter 28 right then and there.  What an ass.  If the cartoon strikes a chord with you as well, you can find more like it at http://abstrusegoose.com/31.

Thoughts on the Fourth of July

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Darwin and his contemporaries saw wonder and beauty in the world around them, in the smallest details and the largest. His fascination for the patterns of creation came out of a long tradition of liberal natural philosophy, first animated by a belief that by understanding the pattern of nature we might understand the mind of God. Ironic. The Drinking and Reading Society is a direct descendent of those amateur naturalists. We too seek the grandeur of the natural world in the books we read and the pursuits of our lives in the streams, prairies and woods.

Once upon a time even our presidents and government officials shared this passion – even were leaders in learning. Theodore Roosevelt for example. On this Fourth of July I wonder if it is even any longer possible to have a president who was curious about the natural world and who saw in its details endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

On On the Origin of Species

It is an argument that would no longer be considered scientific. I was surprised to learn upon reading On the Origin of Species for the first time, (Yes, I know I am late in coming to it, but it always seemed daunting.) that Darwin, like his critics and contemporaries, both religious and secular, presented his argument “from reason” rather than “from fact.” So I can see why Darwin was reluctant to publish and only did so with Wallace’s spur in his side. It’s not just that he didn’t want to offend his religious wife or associates. His argument just wasn’t all that strong. The critics act as though the argument “from fact” has never been made; they continue to argue “from reason.”

So it is a remarkable tribute to the power of Darwin’s insight that his argument stuck at all. It is actually more revealing to read the Voyage of the Beagle because not only is the writing much more lively, but you can actually see how the insight began to form around the kernels of hard data. In hindsight it all seems like an intellectual flashing neon arrow pointing the way to evolution. But had we been in Darwin’s place, given his knowledge and expectations, would any of us have come to the same conclusions?

Rocket

Tonight the Artisan Gallery in Paoli is celebrating the opening of a new show of animals in art and we have an entry. Susan's three-week old colt Rocky, or Rocket, depending on his behavior, is featured in a pastel by Sue Medaris who is gaining a reputation for her unusual animal portraits. It's not exactly a formal family portrait, but it's cool to have a relative appearing in a show.  And the picture captures his personality exactly.

You can see more of Sue Medaris's work at her website.  Or check out the Artisan Gallery for other really good local artists. 

What is Wendell Berry for?

Wendell Berry has been getting a lot of renewed attention from writers such as Michael Pollan and blogs, including this one, because his message of local, human-scale economics, especially agriculture, is very current. And he pens a nifty aphorism. Lots of them in fact.

The Drinking and Reading Society dutifully read Jayber Crow this month and What Are People For? last month, but we are left wondering What is Wendell Berry for? Not his purpose on Earth, but what course of action does he recommend? He obviously has in mind some better model than our hyper-speed modern world that crushes whatever or whoever gets in the way of its headlong pursuit of more. But what does he suggest that we do about it? The question perplexed us again last night in our discussion of Jayber Crow.

Jayber Crow presents a world a half step removed from peasant life. No one goes very far, except to war. Most people you see every day you have known all your life. People take their allotted places in society without any apparent questioning and never leave them. The outside world is the enemy – the bringer of death, destruction and baffling change. The local may have its faults (which are generally left unexamined in the book) but it is sustainable and comforting. We didn’t believe it. Not that Berry didn’t capture the rhythms and mores of small town America. He got a lot of details right. It’s the big picture he missed.

I suppose it’s a bane of a writer to be both essayist and novelist because readers search for his philosophy in his fiction. But it seems Berry welcomes that and is using his fiction as just another tool to communicate his vision of slow, small and sustainable. But if that vision is so perfect, why have generation after generation voted with their feet to get out as fast as they can? There’s a darkness at the heart of small town life that Berry doesn’t face either in his fiction or his essays and there is likewise a noble human yearning for completion that drives people to seek a new world.

I guess we were hoping that Berry would provide some answers about how you reconcile those opposites and that’s what has left us wondering, what’s Wendell Berry for?

What is so rare as a day in June?

It's hard not to recall this famous line when we step outside on such a brilliant morning. But who wrote it? Where did it come from? The answer is below from a blogger named Mike at 10000birds.com/what-is-so-rare-as-a-day-in-june.

The quote “What Is So Rare As A Day In June?” may be familiar to most readers (the sentiment certainly is!) but its source is fairly obscure. This line is but a snippet from the most famous work of the poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a member of the gaggle of authors sometimes called the Fireside Poets or the Schoolroom Poets. Some of his more famous colleagues in this group include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Vision of Sir Launfal is an impressively lengthy poem that tells the story of an Arthurian knight’s search for the Holy Grail. This work is very religious in tone overall, but Lowell does fit in some keen observations about the value of natural beauty. The following verse, from which the apt quote is taken, is a portion of the Prelude to Part First of a very lengthy poem.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the Devil’s booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul’s tasking:
‘T is heaven alone that is given away,
‘T is only God may be had for the asking;
There is no price set on the lavish summer,
And June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays:
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, grasping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well be seen
Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,
The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there ’s never a leaf or a blade too mean
To be some happy creature’s palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o’errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,–

What to read this summer?

Assuming there is any beach left where you vacation, the current issue of Sierra magazine has a few reading suggestions from noted environmentalists and outdoors enthusiasts.

David Quammen recommends Robert Campbell's new book, In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage.

Keith Bowden recommends The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, by Craig Childs.

Paul Hawken suggests The River Why, by David James Duncan because it’s about fishing.

See the entire list at:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200807/mixed-media.asp

Behavioral oilconomics and the politics of emotion

The current political debate about oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and continental shelf areas has reminded me again that humans are not a rational species. Of course, I know from my 25 years in the marketing world that we all feel first and think later. Incidentally, that’s why we feel so angry at advertising. We suspect that we’re being manipulated; we just can’t figure out how. The feeling is perfectly true; good advertising does tug on our emotions in a way that leaves reason far behind and panting to catch up. But don’t blame advertising for that; blame evolution. Our brains developed to feel, not to think.

That’s not just my idea. The Princeton economist Daniel Kahneman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his experimental work in behavioral economics – the science of how humans make irrational decisions in even that most rational of worlds.

So what’s that got to do with oil? Leaving aside the question of profit motive and the false hope of lower gas prices, the drilling proponents are tugging at our patriotic emotions by setting up false enemies (environmentalists, Government, etc.) and by calling the oil in question “our” oil, as if it belonged to you and me and would be siphoned directly from Alaska into our gas tanks if only the heroic oil companies were freed from the chains of mindless regulation. Of course, it’s not “our” oil. It would be “their” oil. It would belong to the international oil companies and they would be free to sell it to anyone they please – most likely Japan and China in the case of Alaskan oil – at whatever price the market will bear.

A cold-eyed patriot with a long-term concern for American security would instead look at this oil as “our” strategic reserve, to be saved to fuel our F-16s when things really go to hell in the Middle East, or at least not to be sold until oil gets to $1,000 a barrel, which it will eventually, and to be nationalized if necessary.  Let's burn the other guys' oil first.  A patriot would say that the USA should get busy improving the energy efficiency of everything we do. That would create American jobs, reduce us from foreign dependence and spur new technology.

But that doesn’t provide nearly the emotional rush of more drilling, does it?

Levitating the Pentagon

This week, Ken Ham, chief wacko at Answers in Genesis, the folks who believe that the Bible is the only authority on everything, spoke to around 150 people at a prayer breakfast at the Pentagon. These are the people who have their fingers on the triggers and the authority to send Americans into harm’s way. How many of those 150 also believe the “end times” are near and that only the big war against Israel must happen before Jesus comes back? Not familiar with AiG? In their words:

We don’t want to be known primarily as ‘young-Earth creationists.’ AiG’s main thrust is NOT ‘young Earth’ as such; our emphasis is on Biblical authority. Believing in a relatively ‘young Earth’ (i.e., only a few thousands of years old, which we accept) is a consequence of accepting the authority of the Word of God as an infallible revelation from our omniscient Creator. Take out your Bible and look through it. You can’t find any hint at all for millions or billions of years.

Reconsidering Wendell Berry

The Drinking & Reading Society is doing the unusual this month; we’re reading only our second work of fiction, in this case Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. That was taking a bit of a chance because, honestly, we didn’t have much to say about Berry’s essays when we read What Are People For? It was kind of inspiring to read; I found myself marking passages and saying, “yeah, that’s right!” But when we discussed the book and asked, “so what should we do about the problems?” nobody could say what solution Berry actually had in mind. It was a most unsatisfying discussion because the topic seemed to elude us whenever we tried to address it in practical terms.

That may have given me a jaundiced view of Jayber Crow, but my opinion so far (I haven’t finished yet) is decidedly minority (90% of Amazon reviews give it 5 stars). While the writing is lyrical and the observations keen, the book is suffused with a golden-hued nostalgia for the small-town life of the early 20th Century that reminds me of a former high school jock looking back on his glory days. As someone who has lived in a small town, I have to say it just ain’t that great. Sure, modern life can and does lead to alienation and worse, as Berry and others have pointed out. But how many people have been squelched by the ironclad expectations that small town society so often fixes upon its natives and which only the most determined seem to be able to transcend? Berry’s narrator is looking back from his old age so I would expect him to have acquired a little wisdom and perspective over the years. He sees and reports the damaged characters – himself included – but never asks why or how they were damaged. Never lays the blame on the small time environment or asks how things might have been different.

That’s a fundamentally conservative point of view – the belief that the rules of the game are - ought to be - pretty much fixed, that problems come from people failing to accept those rules, and that the solutions lie in individual action. A liberal believes that problems may be exacerbated or perpetuated by the environment. As we rediscover Wendell Berry and his undoubted insight into the virtues of a life that’s whole, fresh and local, it’s also good to remember that we don’t have to accept Berry’s whole value system. We should be looking at ways to keep the best of both.

The fog of war

Harry Truman is supposed to have said something like, "I pity the man who, having faithfully read the papers every day, believes he has some idea of what has passed in his time." 

This new book by Patrick Cockburn illustrates the point. PZ sends this link to a review in the June 19 London Review of Books of the new book Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/cock01_.htmll. 

Here’s an excerpt from The Independent, 
Sunday, 13 April 2008, reviewed by Oliver Poole:

One of the more remarkable aspects of the Iraq war is how, even now, more than five years after it started, there is still a lack of general understanding about what has actually unfolded there. To many people, the conflict is merely an incomprehensible Hobbesian mess of mindless bloodshed and violence largely devoid of internal logic.

The spin, propaganda and lies force-fed by politicians and government officials who should have behaved better has left the general public woefully ill-equipped to understand the Iraqi social forces that have shaped events in Mesopotamia.

The achievement of this book is that, by placing the events of the present Iraq war within the context of the developing history of Iraqi Shias, it illustrates how the events of recent years were in large part merely a continuation of pre-existing social and political developments. America and Britain's failure to appreciate this, Cockburn argues convincingly, is the primary cause of the catalogue of errors which has caused the war to become a "cataclysm" in Iraq's history comparable to the "Mongol invasion of 1258".

See the whole review here: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/muqtada-alsadr-and-the-fall-of-iraq-by-patrick-cockburn-807432.html

Speak of the devil

Timothy Egan, author of The Worst Hard Time,  suggests in the NY Times today: Let’s go Godless for the rest of the campaign. He quotes Kennedy thus:

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” And, “I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair.”

He continues:

That was John F. Kennedy, of course, sounding light years removed from Mitt Romney, who declared this year that “freedom requires religion,” and Mike Huckabee, who called himself a “Christian leader” and advocated amending the Constitution to follow Biblical principles. Both men are being touted as running mates for McCain.

“Where we are today is almost the antithesis of Kennedy’s time,” said David Domke, a professor of communications at the University of Washington and co-author, with Kevin Coe, of “The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.”

“It’s the verbal equivalent of an American flag lapel pin: few notice if you do it, but many notice if you don’t,” Domke and Coe wrote in a recent essay in Time.

At a meeting with prominent Christian leaders on Tuesday, Obama discussed his “personal journey of faith,” as one participant recounted. That, alone, goes against Kennedy’s dictum of keeping it private.

Teddy Roosevelt, a McCain hero, was prescient on this point as well. He argued against putting, “In God We Trust,” on the currency in 1907, saying it cheapens the divine. “It not only does no good,” he wrote, “but it does positive harm.”

Read the whole column here: http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/godless/

I was interested in one comment on Egan’s blog that asked, are we concerned about the separation of church and state or the separation of religion and state? Is it acceptable for candidates for office, or for elected officials to express religious sentiments, and if so, when? And is it reasonable to expect that candidates or officials will not express religious sentiments if they happen to have religious beliefs?

We are very sensitive to religious speech, especially by those we don't agree with. The common term innsh'Allah sticks out of a Muslim's speech just the way "the will of God" sticks out of a Christian fundamentalist's. But listen to yourself talk sometime. It is hard to get through the day without making some kind of religious or Biblical reference in everyday speech. We say “Thank God,” to express relief or “Go to Hell,” when we get pissed off. We speak easily of Heaven and paradise, Pearly Gates, The Devil made me do it,” etc, etc. Where is the line we ask candidates not to cross?

All smoke; little fire

Having slogged through the swamp that is Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson’s prodigeous novel of Vietnam, I am unfortunately confirmed in the judgment from my Feb. 24 posting. Johnson does a remarkably good job of seeing the world through the constricted first person narrator viewpoints of the various lowlife characters, many of whom apparently cannot think far beyond the world immediately before them. That’s a great talent for any writer, though he trashes the carefully wrought effect from time to time by injecting the omniscient narrator unexpectedly to no apparent purpose other than to jerk the reader out of the story and remind him that Denis Johnson is writing this book.

I’m sure the author would squirm to hear this, but this is a Pynchon-esque book in search of Thomas Pynchon. It is the book Pynchon could have written about Vietnam if he’d wanted to. That’s not necessarily to praise the book. Pynchon’s later books have been flabby at best. (I enjoyed Mason & Dixon better as a song by Mark Knopfler – the title song of the Sailing to Philadelphia CD – than in print.) But even his pallid later characters have a vigor that Johnson can’t seem to crank up in his personae. They approach the threshold of outrageously bizarre behavior and you think, “this time he’s going over the edge,” only to watch them fall back into the ordinary time after time, but not quite far enough to be ordinary realistic characters. They exist in a netherworld of smoke.

The myth of progress

The NY Times published this chart recently purporting to show that progress, from evolution to technology, increases its pace logarithmically over time.  But is the argument "things are changing faster and faster" really true?  It seems to me that the argument suffers from the recency effect.  The chart above for example graphs the development of the computer and the personal computer as two separate and apparently equal bits of progress data.  But in 100 years or 1,000 years will anyone make such a distinction?  

Sure, there has been a lot of technical change since WWII -- atomic power, jet plane, space travel, computer, DNA, cell phone, etc., but progress has a pretty good run between the invention of the first telescope in 1600 and the microscope in 1665, too. That period included the invention of calculus independently by Newton and Leibnitz, Newton's definition of gravity, Galileo's description of the solar system, the discovery of the refraction of light and the circulation of blood.

Or how about the period 1833 to 1896 from the time the Pottawatomie ceded the area around the mouth of the Chicago river to the U.S. and the Chicago World's Fair?  During that period, the indestructable northern forests were destroyed. The endless buffalo herds were ended. The native Americans lost two-thirds of the continent.  The time required to travel from New York to Chicago was reduced from two week to 12 hours.  The telegraph and electric light were invented. At the beginning of the period, all food was whole, fresh and local.  By the end, people were eating out of cans and beef was being shipped from Kansas to New York in refrigerated train cars.

How fast change moves depends on what data points you consider significant. The more recent the event, the more likely it is to be considered significant. Even evolution doesn't necessarily move faster.  I'm sure a trilobite from 500 million years ago would have seen a great deal more significance in the variations among other trilobites than we admit today. Which is not to say that progress doesn't happen or that some times foster progress and change more than others. But how many years will have to pass before some future progress-ologist lumps "the evolution of mammals" into one big event?

More joy of spring

This photo is from about 2:30 this morning. Kate finally had her foal - on her own birthday and her previous foal Maya's birthday.  Something about June 6 just appeals to that horse.  As usual, it was a dark and stormy night. Susan didn't get much sleep.

The God of physics part 3

Dave sends these thoughts on the difference between physics and biology by Joseph Wood Krutch from his 1949 book The Twelve Seasons.

I can understand how an astronomer may conclude that God is a mathematician. The planets seem to know where they are going and what they are about. Theirs is a formal, unvarying dance with moves in accord with an abstract scheme of delightful regularity; and the mathematical physicist seems to have discovered that the microcosm is, despite the disturbing presence of certain principles suggesting indeterminacy, a good deal like its big brother of heavenly bodies.

But the world of living things exhibits no such cooperation of part with part, no such subordination of the unit to the whole. The God who planned the well working machines of atomand solar system seems to have had no part in arranging the curiously inefficient society of plants and animals in which everything works against everything else; and the struggle between, let us say, the mouse which would continue its species and the owl which would feed its young goes on inconclusively, millennium after millennium.

No one, it seems to me, who has ever watched the contest between two weeds for a few square inches of soil; no one who has seen the intricate history of the one, from seed to leaf, come to nothing -- can possibly suppose that so wasteful a game of cross-purposes was deliberately devised by the astronomer's mathematical God, or indeed by the intelligence which knew what it wanted. If God made a world of atoms and suns, then perhaps life intruded itself unexpectedly upon unity, through some will of its own, multiplicity on unity, conflict on balance. The individual plant or animal is no doubt marvelously contrived to achieve its purposes, but the society of living things is an anarchy in which events may work themselves out to this conclusion or that - but over which no unity of purpose seems to preside.

Krutch was not only a keen observer of nature, but also a literary lion of his time. He wrote the introduction, for example, to the 1934 Random House edition of Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past. There’s an interesting biography on this site devoted to pantheism: http://home.utm.net/pan/krutch.htm

Dark thoughts

This column by Brian Greene ran on Sunday June 1, 2008 in the NY Times and was among the most popular stories for several days. It’s in praise of science as a way of understanding the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01greene.html.  Greene’s main point was this: 

The reason science really matters is that science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

 I was thinking of that in light of Yi-Fu Tuan’s comments (see May 21 post) that biologists see the world as messy and without meaning, perhaps from peering at all that junk DNA, while physicists are led to see the world as a magical creation of some kind of god because of the marvelously beautiful mathematical formulae that seem to inform its structure with an inner order. Then I read this in Tuesday’s Times and now I don’t know what to think:

Dark, Perhaps Forever
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

Through myriad techniques and observations, cosmologists have recently arrived, after decades of strife, at a robust but dark consensus regarding a cosmos in which stars and galaxies, as well as the humans who gawk at them, amount to barely more than a disputatious froth. It was born 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang. By weight it is 4 percent atoms and 22 percent so-called dark matter of unknown identity — perhaps elementary particles that will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider starting up outside Geneva this year. That leaves 74 percent for the weight of whatever began causing the cosmos to accelerate about five billion years ago.

As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know. Some physicists are even willing to burn down their old sainted Einstein and revise his theory of gravity, general relativity, to make the cosmic discrepancies go away. There is in fact a simple explanation for the dark energy, Dr. Witten pointed out, one whose tangled history goes all the way back to Einstein, but it is also the most troubling.

“Dark energy has the somewhat unusual property that it was embarrassing before it was discovered,” he said.

In 1917, Einstein invented a fudge factor known as the cosmological constant, a sort of cosmic repulsion to balance gravity and keep the universe in balance. He abandoned his constant when the universe was discovered to be expanding, but quantum physics resurrected it by showing that empty space should be foaming with energy that had the properties of Einstein’s constant.

“Before the discovery of the dark energy, quantum physicists tended to assume that the ‘vacuum’ we live in has some deep meaning that reflects nature’s deepest secrets,” Dr. Witten said. But if ours is only one of a zillion in a haystack, there is nothing special about it, no secret to be found.

You can read all about it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03dark.html?

What do you think? Dark or not?

Darwin worse than abortion

Maybe you saw the news release:

Evangelicals say ACLU is Top Threat to Nation’s Spiritual Health.

The American Civil Liberties Union was ranked the top threat to America's spiritual wellbeing in an informal write-in survey of American evangelicals recently conducted by Coral Ridge Ministries, a Christian media outreach.

More than 13,000 Christians across America responded to CRM's 2008 Spiritual State of the Nation Survey, distributed in January, assesses where pro-family Christians stand on a wide range of social, economic, and moral issues. Pro-homosexual indoctrination, abortion, Islamic terrorism, and Hollywood rounded out the listing of top threats to America 's spiritual health.

Nothing surprising there – 99 percent agreement across the board – but I thought it interesting (and statistically significant) that the Evangelicals believe it’s more critical to squelch Darwinian teaching than to extirpate abortion.

13. How important is it that America outlaw abortion?
[80%] Critical [12%] Important

16. How important is it that schools teach evolution as a theory rather than a fact—and include evidence for Intelligent Design?

[83%] Critical [9%] Important

Coral Ridge Ministries is the radio and television outreach of Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches more than three million people weekly through more than 750 radio outlets, more than 600 TV stations, and its website, www.coralridge.org.

There were no questions asking whether the nation’s spiritual or civic health might be in danger from the twisted theology and political perversions of certain seminaries, so I guess we’ll never know how those dangers rank. But the survey’s not that far wrong from the radical believer’s point of view.

Darwin, of course, started out as a Christian, educated in theology at Cambridge and teased by his shipmates aboard the Beagle for his Bible-quoting piety, and he continued to cite a divine creator in all his work, but it might not be the creator the Coral Ridge folks believe in.

Says David Quammen in The Reluctant Mr. Darwin:

The existence of god, any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant, is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of man, the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of god, special rights and responsibilities on earth. That’s where Darwin runs afoul of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and probably most other religions on the planet.

In plain language: a soul or no soul? An afterlife or not? Are humans spiritually immortal in a way that chickens and cows aren’t, or just another form of temporarily animated meat? Today we tend to overlook this horrible challenge implied by Darwin’s idea. Theistic evolution has supposedly made the theory safe for people of all faiths.

Is it 1984 yet?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell. 1984

When I read George Orwell’s 1984 back in high school, I wasn’t troubled so much by the idea of Big Brother watching everything. Now we have TIVO that watches what you watch and Homeland Security can tap anyone’s phone and nobody seems concerned. No, what made Orwell’s vision of the future seem unlikely to me then was the notion of an endless war with a shifting identity of “the enemy,” sometimes one, sometimes another. Americans would never fall for that, I figured.  

Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Who is our enemy? Who are our citizen-soldiers fighting in Iraq? The Ba'athists? They're just a ring around the tub. The Sunnis? No, they’re our allies now. The Shi’ia? No, they’re the Iraqi government, which we support. Muqtada al Sadr? Sometimes we’re allies; sometimes enemies. Bush has it confused. McCain is confused. So it’s no surprise that the people are confused. 

Scott McClellan’s admission today that he participated in a grand smokescreen in the run-up to the war only confirms that we are deep into 1984-land.

For an analysis of where this all leads, there is this from the LA Times:

The 'Long War' fallacy
Andrew J. Bacevich
May 15, 2008

Donald Rumsfeld is today a discredited and widely reviled figure. Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's successor as defense secretary, is generally admired for manifesting qualities that Rumsfeld lacked -- a willingness to listen not least among them. Yet on one crucial point, the two see eye to eye: Both believe that the United States has no alternative but to wage a global war likely to last decades.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld wasted no time in telling Americans what to expect. "Forget about 'exit strategies,' " he said on Sept. 28, 2001, "we're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines." Speaking at West Point last month, Gates echoed his predecessor's assessment: "There are no exit strategies," he announced. Instead, Gates described a "generational campaign" entailing "many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world."

For the U.S., the prospect of permanent war now beckons.

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the "Long War" has been about all of these things and more.

Read the whole column at www.latimes.com/news/opinion/ la-oe-bacevich13-2008may13,0,7251551.story

The joys of springtime

One down, one to go. This foal is only 2 days old. His name is Kid. Susan's mare Kate is expecting any day now so we'll have two little ones frisking around.  Spring sure is a lot of work, but it also has its joys.

10 theories of social change

From San Francisco, PZ sends another way to look at the concepts that shape our world (re: the May 20 post: Shakespeare’s world and ours). This is from the Truthout.org website and looks at the big concepts that govern our view of what drives social change. 

Why Change Happens: Ten Theories
Tuesday 13 May 2008
by: Sara Robinson, The Campaign for America's Future

One of the grandest - and most frustrating - things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In fact, there's simply nothing like the Internet if you want to be thrown together with people who have ordered their entire lives around fundamental propositions that would never have occurred to you if you lived to be 100. Behold your fellow earthlings, in all their bizarre and twisted glory....

A lot of these disconnects have to do with all the weird and wonderful theories people have about why change happens. Because we each have our own pet theories of how the world works, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what's likely to happen next. Since these often unspoken understandings are among the things futurists are trained to look for, I thought I'd offer a short taxonomy of the various assumptions people bring to their thinking about what drives social change.

See the 10 theories at www.truthout.org/article/why-change-happens-ten-theories.

Yi Fu Tuan and the God of physics

Thanks to Harry for sending this link to Yi Fu Tuan’s site: http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm. He asks an interesting question about why physicists see God in the universe but biologists don’t, so I have copied the entire (short) post below. The link also gives access to his archives, etc.

May 10, 2008
Dear Colleague:
In 1950, I listened over the radio a debate on "Science and Religion" between the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an agnostic, and classicist Dorothy Sayers, a Christian. Although my sympathy lay with Sayers, I thought Hoyle had the better argument. So imagine my surprise when I learned later that Hoyle came close to accepting Intelligent Design. He was forced to that view by the delicate beauty of stellar nuclear reactions. How could a process so remarkable be just a happy accident? In exasperation, Hoyle is reported to have said, "The universe is a put up job." Hoyle's astonishment is the rule rather than the exception among great physicists of our time. Einstein spoke of the regularities of nature, mathematically precise, as "reason incarnate." He threw around the words "spirit" and "God" rather freely in his philosophical and popular writings. "Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men." Spirit? What spirit? Stephen Hawking wrote: "If we find the answer to [why it is that we and the universe exist], it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." To Max Planck, originator of quantum theory, "There can never be any real opposition between religion and science...They are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition...[and therefore] 'On to God!'"

Isn't there something strange and counter-intuitive in the views of physical scientists? They, after all, study inanimate matter and forces. What room is there in their work for life, much less intelligence, mind, and God? So why do they keep introducing these metaphysical, quasi-religious ideas? Why aren't they all aggressive atheists? Now, if I didn't know better, I would say that biologists are inclined to favor religion and use freely the words "spirit" and "God." They, after all, study life, something that is extremely rare and rather mysterious in the universe. But no. With the exception of Charles Darwin himself, the militant atheists of his day and ours are biologists. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is an outstanding example.

I find this difference between physicists and biologists puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with hinges on "beauty." Physicists are struck by the beauty—the mathematical elegance—of natural laws. Biologists, so far as I know, never see anything beautiful in what they study: not only is ecology messy, even the DNA is complicated, untidy stuff. Life is ugly because it is a product of evolution. A lot of redundancy is built into life's functions to ensure its survival. The "God" of biologists—if biologists ever get to postulate such a being!—is an engineer, not a mathematician. The engineer, having just designed a bridge that perfectly adapts to a specific set of conditions, then more or less arbitrarily adds a factor of ten to its tensile strength, just so that it can survive a once-in-fifty-year blizzard! No wonder bridges are so clunky and ugly. No wonder, dear colleague, we—built by nature or God the engineer—are so ugly. Such uglinesses don't require that we postulate "intelligence" or "God."
Yi Fu

Shakespeare's world and ours

There’s no reason I’m thinking about Shakespeare today except that I was recently in his hometown. But it occurred to me that most of us are familiar with his plays and find him very perceptive about human nature and a generally wise guy. But what would it be like to hold a conversation with him? Consider all of the concepts that we take for granted in our worldview of which Bill was completely ignorant. Here are 25 that I thought of this morning:

1. The age of the earth
2. Radioactivity
3. Bacteria and the germ theory of disease
4. Oxygen
5. Evolution
6. Space (rather than ether)
7. Blood circulation
8. Neanderthals
9. The speed of light
10. Ice ages
11. Gravity (the theory of)
12. The atom
13. Rock stratification indicating age
14. Right brain / left brain
15. Plate tectonics
16. DNA and genetic inheritance
17. How sex makes babies
18. Why the sun is hot
19. Psychoanalysis and the subconscious
20. Dinosaurs
21. The big bang theory
22. Meteorology / how weather happens
23. The finite nature of natural resources
24. Calories
25. The on/off switch

My guess is that in the first five minutes of our dialog, we would get stuck on a concept that we think of as essential to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but that would be entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare.

At least he knew, or could have known, that the Earth orbits the sun, since Copernicus published that opinion about 50 years before Shakespeare was born. On the other hand, Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Church to shut up about heliocentrism in the same year Shakespeare died, so it wasn't exactly accepted fact in all quarters. 

So the next time we are tempted to think we have the ultimate answer to any question at all, I guess we should stop and ask what fundamental concepts we might be ignorant of that our colleagues from 2408 (if humanity lasts that long) will consider basic to understanding the world. Just a thought for the day to put things in perspective.