President Obama's eulogy

I was heartened by President Obama's question to the people of Newtown, and to the rest of us:

Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?  Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

That would be the exact question, almost to the word, that I would put before those who fear that the loss of their guns would mean the end of freedom.  There comes a tipping point, when you have to understand that following your beliefs to the letter can do more harm than good.

In any case, I am not advocating the rounding up of guns from people who hunt, or who want to protect themselves in their own homes.  But there have to be limits in what we allow people to own.  Let's get together and define those limits.

President Obama finds himself in a difficult situation again, because of the people who believe, without any reason a sane person can see, that the government will be coming after everybody's guns during his second term.  But we really can't reach the delusional.  Reasonable people must work this problem out.

President Obama has become, or is trying to become, a symbol of government that protects citizens from harm, not of a government that is the enemy of the people.  I truly hope that more people begin to work to build, or rebuild, such a government.

Twenty schoolchildren

Regarding the twenty children and six adults killed in the Connecticut elementary school today, I am warning any gun nut or second amendment absolutist to SHUT THE FUCK UP in my presence, and to grow up about the second amendment and responsible gun control.

I have heard everything you have to say countless times whenever there is a mass shooting in this country.  I do not want to hear what you have to say, ever again.  You second amendment absolutists may take the second amendment and your first amendment rights and shove them up your ass.  Or you can expect a punch in the face.

A little frivolity

OK, some guy over on Slate recently did a series on "prog," which refers to the old bloated, pretentious, but sometimes good, genre of rock that punk rose up and slew in the late 1970s.  He mentioned a lot of the usual suspects, like Yes and Jethro Tull, whose ambitions ended up being disparaged as just too much.

I got to wondering how, through it all, Pink Floyd escaped that fate.  I thought about this as I listened to Atom Heart Mother, which is about as overblown as rock gets.  Don't get me wrong, I like Pink Floyd, and I recognize that they may have been saved in part by their sense of humor, although works like The Wall made me think that Pink Floyd's popularity might better be explained by the great well of depression that was there for the tapping in the general public.

But it's just one of those things I sometimes wonder about.  How did such a weird band become, and remain, so popular among people who ordinarily like stuff that's a little safer?

The meaning of Ken Burns's "The Dust Bowl"

The timing of the new Ken Burns documentary is no mistake.  If you are watching the harrowing two-part series, and I hope you are, I think that you will find that "The Dust Bowl" is not merely a look at the past, but also a lesson about the present and the future.  The many voices in the documentary often remind the viewer that the dust bowl was an ecological disaster that was man made, and that it did not take humans very long to accomplish it.

Many people find it hard to believe that human activity could have such large and long-lasting consequences.  But it took us less than a hundred years to make a mess of the Great Plains, and all we had to do was to get rid of the buffalo grass that was protecting the soil.  We've been working at pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere world-wide for hundreds of years now, and I think that it's time we begin to know our own strength.

Magic powers

Does the Republican reaction to Nate Silver's polling success remind anyone else of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?

Several inconvenient truths

There are two kinds of polls.  The first kind is designed to find out, as nearly as the sampling methodology can, what public opinion is.  The second kind is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to buttress certain people's fantasy land.

This is true, as we know, not only of polls, but of science and other sources of information.  We know that people, some more than others, are prone to want their information to confirm what they want to believe.

People who could not bring themselves to believe that a black man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama could really have come to be President of the United States constructed their birther fantasies.

People who found that the theory of evolution conflicted with their deeply held beliefs built edifices of pseudoscience.

People who didn't want to believe that the activities of mankind have heated up the atmosphere found ways to discredit climate scientists instead of trying to prove them wrong.

People who thought that mainstream scholarship had a liberal slant wrote Conservapedia, claiming to correct the slant, but actually creating more fantasy for themselves and others like them.

People who found it inconvenient to love their neighbor in the way that Jesus taught started the Conservative Bible Project, again in the name of correcting a liberal slant, but without any particular evidence of liberal meddling.  Their own meddling actually served only to dismantle the very foundation of Christianity.

And in the weeks before yesterday's presidential election, people who could not stand the idea of four more years with Barack Hussein Obama began to claim that the polls claiming that he would win had actually been falsified and given a liberal bias.

The truth is, of course, that the poll with the best scientific methodology is the most useful.  You can make predictions from an honest poll, and, lo, the predictions will come true.  Poll methodology influenced by wishful thinking may succeed in making the faithful happy in the short term, but when the election comes, the believers will just end up all the more disappointed that the results were exactly as predicted by the poll designed by people who just wanted to know what would happen.

Dare I hope?

There are signs that people are actually catching on to Mitt Romney's practice of constant lying, and that they're actually indignant about it.

Romney seems to be betting that, if he takes enough different positions on the same issue, people will respond to the position they like by voting for him.  But perhaps, perhaps, lies do actually catch up with you if you tell enough of them over a long enough period of time.

Logic 101, part 2, with primary sources thrown in

Hello, Romney supporters!  Do you believe everything he says, even though his positions change so often?  Or do you believe the last thing he said, thinking it must be his final position?

The information is out there.  You can Google Romney's quotes.  I'm sure he's all over YouTube.

Once upon a time, the information was available that, as Governor of California, Ronald Reagan ran up the biggest deficits in the state's history.  We elected him anyway, and he ran up the same deficits nationwide.

Nowadays we are privy to all of Romney's past positions on abortion and everything else.  It is clear that the man is lying at least 50% of the time.  Please, do a little research before you vote!  We can avoid more Reaganesque calamity by not voting for Romney.

Logic 101

Conservative politician A says that there really are no babies resulting from rape, because a woman's body can "shut that thing down."

Conservative politician B says that women should bring their rape babies to term.

You really can't believe both of those statements unless you don't have working logic circuits.  If you're the kind of person who, after being told that Genesis has two different creation stories that contradict each other, still believes every word of the Bible is inerrant, you're the type of person who can believe both of the above conservative politicians.

People, I hate 'em.

I'm in a very gloomy mood today, which is unusual since I began the meds several years ago.

Last night, I watched the Frontline episode called Climate of Doubt, which recounts the propaganda campaign being carried out to sew the seeds of doubt about climate change.  The effort, funded by folks like the Koch brothers, is similar to that of the tobacco companies to try to prove that cigarettes are not dangerous.  You find a few scientists, some of whom really have convinced themselves that climate change isn't real, others of whom can merely be bought, and you have them declare to a scientifically illiterate public, "I am a scientist, and climate change is bunk."  The weapons of these people are soothing reassurance, magic trick-style misdirection, and misuse of statistics.

There are people behind the disinformation campaign--oil company executives, et al.--whose short term financial interests are served by our continued inaction on global warming.  Their true believers seem to be those who fear government meddling with free enterprise more than they fear anything else.  The true believers are short sighted.  They can only manage to see a single danger.  Indeed, in a telling moment, one of the interviewed scientists characterized current climate science as Marxist.  In other words, this man's political fears cloud his vision, so that he cannot see beyond them.

Meanwhile, his fellow propagandists characterize the current scientific consensus as politically driven.  (I have often noticed how deftly conservatives accuse their enemies of the very sins they themselves are most guilty of.)

And do the renegade scientists counter the consensus with good science of their own?  No, they either make conspiratorial accusations about the scientists they are trying to discredit, or misuse the scientific data to cast doubt into minds that are all too ready to be soothed into thinking that there are no problems.  Indeed, the anti-climate change science propagandists seem untroubled by their own lack of contradictory data, and keep working nonetheless.  Their own barely submerged knowledge that they are wrong seems to make them work all the harder to prove they are right.

                                                                        ***

I am further troubled by the closeness of the election.  In Mitt Romney, I see a man who changes his own opinions (i.e., lies) several times a day.  And I have a hard time understanding why so many of the population are so unaware they are being bullshitted.

Sleight of hand

Well, now, those secret Mitt tapes bring so many ideas swirling into my mind.  Some of them I have already blogged about, others I haven't, and I think all of them will be spilling, not very neatly, into this entry.

Everyone is talking mostly about Romney's statement about that 47% of the public who won't vote for him, because, by golly, they already don't pay taxes, so why should they care about Mitt's tax cuts?  Well, I'd say many of the 47% that he's written off are as much concerned about his tax cuts for the top one per cent as they are about their own situation.  I think that the people in the middle class have finally started to catch on that there are magic tricks going on that involve their money.  "Look!" cries Mitt the Magician, "Those illegal immigrants are taking your tax money!"  And while you're eyeing the immigrants, Mitt the Magician is stealing your pension and your job.

There is no trickle-down.  There is only evaporate-up.

I've spoken before about wondering how the super-rich see the rest of us, and Mitt's pronouncements to his peers give us a good idea as to how at least one of them sees us.  How many of his cohort were nodding in agreement?

But the part of the tape that really got me was when Mitt said that he wished he were a Mexican, because then he'd have a better chance being elected.  Mitt Romney, multi-millionaire, who probably thought he and the Koch brothers had enough money to buy the presidency outright, actually has it in him to feel victimized because he's not a Mexican!  Oh, the advantages those Mexicans have over poor, poor me!

That's the mind-boggling thing, to me.  Mitt the poor little rich boy, envying the Mexican.

Meanwhile, everywhere I look, I see Mexicans working their asses off in minimum wage jobs.

In addition to the efforts of the Republicans to dismantle the New Deal, they're also attacking the unions while they are weak.  In this time when the difference between the income at the top and the income at the bottom has grown so large, we need stronger unions, so that people are paid what their work is worth, not what a Robber Baron like Mitt Romney thinks he can get away with paying.

There's my disorganized take on the Mitt Tapes.

Personhood

Scattered around the state governments of our nation, we find laws and constitutional amendments declaring the personhood of fetuses.  To judge from the behavior of some of the sponsors of these bills, life begins at conception and ends at birth.  These personhood bills are presented against the background of an era in which so many are loath to give any assistance to people, very much alive, who are suffering lives in poverty.

I have stated before, in my blog about the second amendment, that society often sees fit to find exceptions to all of our laws and freedoms.  To the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," we make the exception of war, to which we sacrifice so many of our own children.

In our era, we celebrate as inspirational stories of athletes performing miraculous feats on miraculously fashioned artificial limbs.  Such celebration is a way for us to shift our vision away from the fact that a generation of our young has been blown apart and maimed, not by terrorism, but by the stupid response of our leaders to terrorism.

To the people who find that society must make exceptions to its own cherished beliefs, the power of individuals to make their own choices in regard to their own unborn children is to be denied.

Yes, the same people who would send our beloved, fully alive, children into the meat grinder of war, are ostentatiously, sanctimoniously concerned with the suffering of a being who, though barely conscious of being alive, is subjected to the instantaneous action of a morning after pill, or to an abortion.

When these people start recognizing the sanctity of life outside the womb, I will be more ready to discuss the sanctity of life before birth.

I once heard a professor explain the concept of "standing."  He said that, in time of war, the society chooses, for possible sacrifice, those with the lowest standing, that is, young men without wives or families.  Is there anyone in society with less standing than an unwanted embryo?

Academic "freedom"

A hero of mine, Dr. Eugenie Scott, heads up the National Center for Science Education, and fights endlessly to let teachers teach science without religious and political influence.  She was interviewed by Paul Fidalgo for Skeptical Inquirer about a bill in Tennessee that would direct teachers to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of such "controversial subjects" as evolution and climate change.

Having morphed from creation science to intelligent design, which were recognized by the courts as attempts to inject religion into public school science teaching, the proponents have learned to completely leave religion out of the argument and to try other tactics.  Says Dr. Scott:

Actually, this is not your grandfather's creationism.  We have been tracking these "Academic Freedom Act" types of bills since about 2004, and they do provide a somewhat different approach than what was going on in Dover, Pennsylvania.

The Tennessee bill is worrisome because it so carefully avoids religion; it never mentions creationism or intelligent design.  The approach is to treat evolution (and global warming and the other laundry list of subjects) as "controversial subjects" that need to be singled out for special treatment in the curriculum.  Teachers are directed to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of the subjects, as if they were topics that were of questionable validity in science.  They may be controversial to the general public, but they are certainly not controversial among scientists.

The careful avoidance of any reference to religion makes these bills more difficult to challenge on constitutional grounds.  They also are difficult to challenge because they invoke cultural values like fairness and freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Well, now.  If a legislature directs teachers to teach in a certain way, how in the world is that academic freedom?  Case closed.

 

 

Getting America's attention

We've got it pretty good in this country, and most of us are content, and busy.  Busy making money, busy falling in love, busy with all our various distractions.  There are over 300 million of us, living our busy lives, and it takes a long time to get the whole country's attention when something is amiss.

I've been worrying and going on about neoconservatives and Teabaggers for a long time.  There are others like me, and we tend to get ignored because we're perceived as people who complain too much; and the more we're ignored, the more worried we get, and that makes us talk all the more.

The complainers on my side of the political spectrum have become alarmed about the complainers on the other end, who have made noises about revolting if the next election doesn't go their way.  We're alarmed that the Republican Party has been taken over by people who are ignorant, and who laud ignorance.  Today's Republican Party is in the difficult position of having to disguise their agenda because so much of it is unpopular with people when it is spelled out to them.

If you ask people if they prefer Obama's programs or Romney's, a certain number of the respondents will say Romney's.  But when you ask them about individual questions without mentioning which candidate espouses them, a much lower number of people choose Romney's programs.  Clearly, many people don't study the issues much.  They're too busy to really pay attention.

Now, there are people on the far right, as we know, who want to dismantle the New Deal completely.  They want to privatize Social Security and end Medicare.  There are people on the far right who actually want our children taught that slavery wasn't so bad.  As I have mentioned before, once upon a time, conservatives would have been happy if the government would stop giving handouts to the unemployed; now the Teabaggers are against helping the poor even if they are working.  Once upon a time, the pro-life movement would have been happy to stop abortion; now they are attacking all forms of birth control.

The Republican Party knows that the things they believe in are unpopular if they are understood properly.  So they're running a sort of stealth campaign.  They want their programs passed even if the populace doesn't like those programs.  However, recent statements by some of the most extreme Republicans may have shaken the nation awake.

Todd Akin, Republican candidate for the Senate from Missouri has come under fire for saying that women's bodies can naturally prevent pregnancy by a rapist.  Their fear of this traumatic event, Mr. Akin claims, causes some sort of chemical change in their bodies that keeps them from getting pregnant.  Now, I don't know if Akin really believes this, although he probably does, but he's not a lone ignoramus.  This belief is widespread among pro-lifers who want abortion banned with no exceptions.  If they don't believe in pregnancy by rape, they don't have to worry about the exception.

The nastiest part of this, of course, is that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, it's proof that she wanted it.

This story has gotten a lot of attention, and I think it may have alerted the sleepier members of the population that there is madness afoot.  Perhaps the electorate will begin to pay attention to what the candidates believe in.  For that, we can thank the overreach of the Teabaggers.

Faith in...?

On the way home, I passed a church with a nice big sign with the message, "Faith is trusting God, even when questions go unanswered."

That's the problem with faith.  Theologians and Sunday school classes wrestle with reality, in a literal sense.  They look at the world around them, and find convoluted ways to convince themselves that faith is warranted, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Faith in what, anyway?  That in spite of all their troubles, there is a loving God who cares for them?  Or that after their hard travails on earth, God will take care of them at last, leading them to heaven?

A friend of mine came down with a mysterious-sounding disease, some sort of infection of the spine.  She was out of work for months, and we wondered if she would ever recover.  Finally, she did, and on returning to work, she was aglow, and said to me, "To God goes the glory!"

One often sees news stories of devastation from natural disasters, homes destroyed, loss of life, and in the middle of the ruins of a home, the owner will say, "God is merciful.  Praise the Lord!"  Naturally, the person is happy to be alive, but what about all the others who aren't?  What about the bringer of the destruction?

And prayer is the most unpredictable of endeavors.  Whenever someone becomes deathly ill, their friends pray for them.  Sometimes they get well, sometimes they don't.  When they do, God is praised.  When they don't, the rationalizations begin.  (And as we know from an earlier lesson, God is unable or unwilling to regrow severed limbs, casting suspicion on all the other things prayer is given credit for healing.)

The believers go on trying to make sense of it, to convince themselves of God's goodness in the face of misery.

I don't believe in God, but if I'm wrong and there is one, It (how could we know if It had any gender or any kind of human attributes?), on the basis of what we see around us, is surely the most impersonal of beings.  We live in a beautiful world, an abundant world, but none of us knows that some accident or illness or other disaster won't snuff us out an instant from now.

Of course, we're grateful every moment we're alive, but I wouldn't bother this God about it, because It is not paying attention.

Mustarjil

If you read widely enough, you're bound to find things that surprise you.  To the best of my knowledge, homosexuality is a crime in most Muslim countries, in some countries punishable by death.

So it came as a surprise to me that, in practice, in at least one place, there was sympathy for people who felt that they were born the wrong sex.

This passage, from The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger, was published in 1964.  The marsh Arabs were people who lived in the marshes of Iraq before Saddam Hussein drained those marshes to drive out the Shia Muslims who lived there.

One afternoon, some days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland.  The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his mudhif by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist.  He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side.  In the past all the Madan wore their hair like that, as the Bedu still did.  After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara asked, "Did you realize that was a mustarjil?"  I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.

"A mustarjil is born a woman," Amara explained.  "She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man."

"Do men accept her?"

"Certainly.  We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif.  When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her.  We never do that for a woman.  In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman."

"Do they always wear their hair plaited?"

"Usually they shave it off like men."

"Do mustarjils ever marry?"

"No, they sleep with women as we do."

Once, however, we were in a village for a marriage, when the bride, to everyone's amazement, was in fact a mustarjil.  In this case she had agreed to wear women's clothes and to sleep with her husband on condition that he never asked her to do women's work.  The mustarjils were much respected, and their nearest equivalent seemed to be the Amazons of antiquity.  I met a number of others during the following years.  One man came to me with what I took for his twelve-year-old son, suffering from colic, but when I wanted to examine the child, the father said, "He is a mustarjil."

...

Previously, while staying with Hamud, Majid's brother, I was sitting in the diwaniya when a stout, middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment.  She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ.  "Will you cut this off and make me into a proper woman?" he pleaded.  I had to confess that the operation was beyond me.  When he had left, Amara asked compassionately, "Could they not do it for him in Basra?  Except for that, he really is a woman, poor thing."

So there is some wiggle room for people who are different.  All that said, it is a shame that normal women are treated so badly under Islam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBC: How about a little respect for sports and sports fans?

Let me start by saying that I know that commercial television has to have commercials.  I grew up with commercial TV, and I survived, and I know that TV has to have an income stream.  But in their zeal for satisfying their obligations to their sponsors, they sometimes don't think enough about the integrity of their entertainment product.

Take, for example, the Olympic Games.  I hope that not too many readers lose interest when I say that I am a distance running enthusiast.  I'm not really interested in the sprints; races 800 meters or longer get my attention, though.  So it irks me when, in the course of the 5,000 meter race, which takes less than fifteen minutes to run, there are at least two commercial breaks.  Now, I don't begrudge the network their commercials in the 10,000 meter or the marathon, because, by golly, that's a long time to go without selling something.  But the number of breaks is, I think, excessive.

While we're at it, something else really got me shouting at the TV during the women's marathon.  Not content to interrupt that race only for commercials, they also ran little featurettes during the race.  (They didn't do this during the men's marathon, presumably because the Olympics were just about over.)  Such unnecessary intrusions are disrespectful to the viewers, and especially, in this case, to the women running the race.

Anyway, after my complaining about the placement of commercials and their detrimental effect on my enjoyment of the sporting events, there's a punchline!

Last night, I watched the closing ceremonies (which were something like a cross between MOULIN ROUGE and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade).  I wasn't too interested in the ceremonies, but I wanted to see The Who.  Before every commercial break, Ryan Seacrest would say, "We'll be back with more, including The Who!"  But as eleven o'clock approached, there seemed less and less time for the headliners.  (At this point you can call me a fool for not checking the program guide more carefully, but no matter.)

Then, at 10:58, Bob Costas announced, "Later on tonight, we'll be back with The Who, but first, we'll broadcast the first episode of the new comedy, 'Animal Practice,' WITHOUT COMMERCIAL INTERRUPTION!"

Oh, NBC, thank you, thank you, for the gift.

David Barton again

David Barton, you may recall, is the guy who will use any trick in the book to try to prove that the Founding Fathers wanted the USA to be a Christian nation.  He was a favorite on the Glenn Beck TV show.  His historical method mostly consists of out-of-context quotation and misinterpretation of bits of quotes.  He claims to have voluminous primary evidence, but hasn't shown a lot of it to other historians.

In the past, when his work was debunked, his response was to say that the debunkers had a liberal, secular bias, and therefore couldn't be trusted.  But his new book, "The Jefferson Lies" (an unintentionally funny title, in my opinion), the first of his books to be published by a company other that Barton's own WallBuilders, has been unfavorably reviewed by other conservative historians.  There have been enough substantive complaints about the book that the publisher, Thomas Nelson, Inc., has withdrawn it from the stores.

A recent negative review of the book was written by Steven Green who, despite being Director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University (a school founded by Methodist missionaries), will probably not be deemed by Barton and his supporters as conservative enough or religious enough to be trustworthy.  First of all Dr. Green just has too many degrees, and therefore must be a member of the club that won't let David Barton in.  Second, Dr. Green, a Christian, also believes in the separation of church and state.

Green points out that, in the new book, Barton takes a different tack from his previous ones.

Most likely, Barton seeks to reach a mainstream audience with "The Jefferson Lies" unlike the audience of his earlier works, one that lacks a predisposition toward a Christian nationalism perspective.  Not only has Barton's tone moderated, so too have some of his claims.  Unlike his earlier works where Barton characterized separation of church and state  as a false concept that has contributed to the nation's moral decay, he now embraces a modified version of the concept, one that promotes religious values.  It is as if Barton has realized that he can advance his perspective more effectively through stealth and subtlety, rather than through confrontational polemics.

Reading that paragraph, I zeroed in on the words "stealth and subtlety," which I recognize from so many other right-wing intellectual pursuits, including their attempts to cloak religious beliefs as science. When their arguments are debunked, as they always are, they rewrite the same arguments with new terminology.

Again it occurs to me to wonder whether these people have, at some level, a recognition that they are lying in order to convince others of what they believe.  And if so, if the only way to defend their position is by trickery, mustn't what they are defending be false?

In any case, I can imagine David Barton's believers thinking that, in the face of criticism from these unexpected quarters, that the insidious infiltration by the evil forces of liberal secularism must be worse and more widespread than they ever imagined!  My God, they've gotten to the religious conservatives!

Limits of liberty

That headline is gonna scare the Libertarians.  Boo!  I don't care.

In the wake of all the latest mass shootings, those who want to ban assault weapons note that, after a single Muslim terrorist made his shoes into bombs, anyone who gets on a plane has to take off his or her shoes while going through security.  They wonder why, after so many mass shootings, we don't seem to take *that* problem seriously enough to do a single thing about it.

Second Amendment absolutists might argue that the Constitution doesn't guarantee us the right to wear shoes.  That would be true, but not helpful.

I had more or less made up my mind, as a lover of the Bill of Rights, to shut up about the Second Amendment, troublesome as it is.  But it occurs to me that common sense dictates limitations to our rights under the other amendments.  I would consider myself more dedicated to the First Amendment than the average citizen, but even so, I recognize libel and slander as harmful things that are rightfully exceptions to our freedom of speech.

If there are limits to the rights granted by the other amendments, why not the Second?

Magical thinking

They think that lowering taxes will bring in more revenue.

They think that arming more people with guns will result in less gun violence.

Make work projects

Now and then, I like to quote illustrious authors who agree with my own exalted opinions.  In this case, the subject is New Deal programs that put people from all walks in life to work.  Conservatives don't like the government spending money on things like this.  I guess they think government money is somehow impure, unlike private sector money.  Or maybe they think it makes us soft.  My opinion is, things needed to be done, people needed work, and a lot of wonderful things got done.  There's no shame in any of that.  Nobody got a handout.  They worked, and they felt useful once again.

You will recall that even artists and writers got paid for jobs they did for the government.  Here is John Steinbeck on the subject, from Travels With Charley.

If there had been room in Rocinante, I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them.  I have all of them, and some are very rare.  If I remember correctly, North Dakota printed only eight hundred copies and South Dakota about five hundred.  The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.  It was compiled during the depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating.  But these books were detested by Mr. Roosevelt's opposition.  If W.P.A. workers leaned on their shovels, the writers leaned on their pens.  The result was that in some states the plates were broken up after a few copies were printed, and that is a shame because they were reservoirs of organized, documented, and well-written information, geological, historical, and economic.  If I had carried my guides along, for example, I would have looked up Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where I stopped, and would have known why it is called Detroit Lakes, who named it, when, and why.  I stopped near there late at night, and so did Charley, and I don't know any more about it than he does.

Further bafflement

I know I've gone on about this before, but I am still baffled that people continue to lie in defense of their positions.  I mean, I understand that sometimes people believe that their false beliefs are true, but that's not what I'm talking about.  I mean people who have made false statements, been shown that their statements were false, and yet gone on repeating them.

Isn't a belief that has to be proven by lies a worthless thing?  Why continue to defend it?

A friend of mine is an Obama hater.  I will advance no opinion as to why he hates Obama.  Recently, he passed along a piece of propaganda that you may have seen going around the internet.  It goes like this:

Since its construction, only three times have presidents failed to go to the D-Day Monument that honors the soldiers killed on D-Day.  Those three presidents were:

1. Barack Obama 2010

2. Barack Obama 2011

3. Barack Obama 2012

I don't know who originated this little tidbit, but similar items are foisted on the public more than occasionally.  If you're in agreement with the originator, you nod your head sagely and say your Tut tuts.  We all do at least a little of this, believing things that support our way of thinking, disbelieving things that don't.  But if someone can demonstrate the falsity of a claim, why do some people continue to make the claim?

I ask because this friend of mine posted the above item in a forum a while back, and was directed to the Snopes page that debunks it.  Aside from the fact that the above mentioned "D-Day monument" is not clearly identified, Snopes points out that, in fact, presidential visits to any of the possible D-Day monuments have been the exception, rather than the rule, since Ronald Reagan made his only visit to Normandy in 1984.

Ronald Reagan visited Normandy once (40th anniversary of D-Day).

Bill Clinton visited Normandy once (50th anniversary).

George W. Bush visited Normandy twice (60th anniversary of D-Day, and also a Memorial Day visit).

Barack Obama visited Normandy once (65th anniversary).

This same friend of mine recently reposted the claim in another cyber-venue as though it were true.  Now, does my friend just hate Obama so much that he will make any statement about him that might influence others to not vote for him?  Or did my friend just start disbelieving anything published on Snopes because he wanted so much to believe what was demonstrably false?

People can have any opinion they want to, but facts are checkable.

 

 

 

Bad weather

You remember Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the woman who is no longer dabbling in witchcraft?  You may recall that she was in favor of local control over what is taught in schools.

What I will support in Washington, D.C. is the ability for the local school system to decide what is taught in their classrooms and what I was talking about on that show was a classroom that was not allowed to teach creationism as an equal theory as evolution. That is against their constitutional rights and that is an overreaching arm of the government.

Now, her reasoning was a little topsy-turvy, in that education is the process of finding out stuff from people who know more than you do.  If you're going to be telling them that you already know what's true, and that you only want them to teach you stuff you agree with, what's the point of going through the process at all?

You may also recall this gem from Rick Santorum:

Oh, I understand why [Obama] wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

We now, I think, are getting to the bottom of this distrust of "liberal college professors."  They undermine parental authority.  Now, in my view, Santorum's wish to preserve authority in his own home, even in cases where he might be mistaken, leads to an authoritarian society, if carried to its logical conclusion.  That society would, for example, punish a scientist who discovers something that doesn't conform to the views of the authorities.  After all, we have seen that happen many times in history.

But Christine O'Donnell and Rick Santorum are only two people, and although their opinions are aired in the media, their political success is spotty.

But check out the new platform of the Texas Republican Party:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Here we have a major state political party saying that authority is a higher value than being able to think for oneself.  Now, I realize that they believe that courses in critical thinking are Liberal indoctrination, but the results of these policies, if implemented, would result, I think, in a dangerously authoritarian society, in which freedom of thought is restricted, and truth is determined by whoever is in power, rather than by logic and empiricism.

I've often wondered in this blog, why this craziness has taken hold.  I wonder now how far it might go. Sometimes it seems to me that obviously dangerous political juggernauts proceed in much the same way as natural disasters.  The mood comes over the populace, and there's seemingly nothing that can be done to stop it.  One hopes merely to survive it, knowing that, one day, it too will pass.

I hope this particular storm is a short one.

 

Consequences

We've often noted the phenomenon of people's faith actually getting stronger in the face of evidence that it is false.  For example, when a cult leader predicts the end of the world, and it doesn't happen, his followers seem somehow to find a way to believe that this failure proves their belief was true.

Recently this sort of thinking had deadly consequences for one Mark Wolford, a "snake-handling" pastor from West Virginia.  Pastor Wolford died of a rattlesnake bite at age 44.  That outcome, of course, was more predictable than remarkable.  The remarkable thing about this case is that Mark Wolford saw his own father die of snakebite at the age of 39.

Now, the basis of the snake-handling religion is in Mark 16: 17-18, which says, among other things, that believers "shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them...."

After witnessing the death of another snake-handling pastor, the observer might believe that the Bible verse had been proven false; but again he or she could also believe that the bitten and deceased was not a true believer after all. Perhaps Mark Wolford believed that about his father.

In any case, in an interview he gave to the Washington Post Magazine a while back, Wolford said of his decision to pursue snake-handling himself, "I know it's real; it is the power of God.  If I didn't do it, if I'd never gotten back involved, it'd be the same as denying the power and saying it was not real."

We should not be surprised if other such cases follow.

Golf and Gatlinburg

I'm going to strain an analogy to the breaking point.

Back in the '80s, I spent a little time in Smoky Mountain National Park.  I like the National Park System.  For all its faults, it tries to keep some of our country's most beautiful land as pristine as possible, while also making it accessible to people for their enjoyment.  National Parks are, at their best, quiet, unspoiled places.

Right outside of Smoky Mountain National Park, however, is a town called Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  When I was passing through there on my way to the park, I was struck by just how garishly ugly the place was.  It was as though the crassest commercial growth that was not allowed within the park boundaries had accreted on the border striving to make its way inside and infest the park.

Here I go.

As I've watched more golf tournaments in the past few years, I've noticed (as who has not?) the phenomenon of yahoos shouting, "IN THE HOLE!" immediately after golfers tee off.  Now, golf is a game that takes concentration, and golf etiquette insists that all participants, including spectators, be absolutely silent before any golf shot.  The time before the shot is as holy, if you will, as many people consider a National Park.

But somehow, the millisecond after a tee shot is now the occasion for sudden howling.  Most golf lovers don't take part in these odd outbursts, but a few idiots seem to think they're really cool when they yell.  I don't think I could go to a golf tournament without getting in a fistfight with one of these louts.

I said the analogy would be stretched, but there you have it.  The hollerers remind me of Gatlinburg.

Benefits of walking

I went for a walk today, about 2 1/2 miles.  A little before midway on the walk, there's a Starbuck's.  I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but Starbuck's has a brownie, and God, it's good.

Right away you're thinking, "That brownie just undid your entire walk!"  That would be true if the simple burning of calories was the only benefit of a walk.  But a walk also strengthens the legs, the lungs, and the heart.

And then there are the pleasures of a walk.  Now I have to admit that, when it comes to scenery, I live in a boring neighborhood.  The houses were all built at the same time, and there are only three types.  The walk consists of a ranch, a Cape Cod, a colonial, a ranch, a Cape Cod, a colonial, and so on.

But along the way, you might see a pretty girl.  And along the way, you might see a beautifully restored 1957 Chevrolet.  I am a man who loves great art, but neither a pretty girl nor a '57 Chevy has ever been matched for beauty.

Then there's the old man's reverie, in which he drives a '57 Chevy full of pretty girls.  It could happen, right?

Years ago, I was a runner, and running was a joy.  I've always given walking short shrift, as rather a dull pursuit in comparison.  A few weeks ago, I thought I might giving running another try.  But I'm 20 pounds heavier now, and almost as many years older.  I found my little jog to be unpleasantly punishing to the knees.

When you discover running will never be the pleasure it once was, a walk is sweet.

Phyllis Schlafly, human pretzel

Whenever the subject of Phyllis Schlafly comes up, as it has lately in connection to her lecture at VMI, logical people ask themselves and each other, "Why does she instruct women to behave the opposite way from which she herself behaves?"

If you don't remember Ms. Schlafly from the olden days, she made a career in public speaking.  Her message was that women ought to stay home and not have careers.

This sort of thing happens to people who attempt to stick to their beliefs, no matter what evidence there might be against those beliefs.  Quite simply, it was not Phyllis Schlafly's true nature to sit at home and be quiet.  In order to be herself, yet be acceptable to others in her own circle, her message had to contradict her own life.  Her beliefs are rigid, yet her "self" is bent like a pretzel.

Are these people to be pitied, or scorned?  How about lawmakers who vote for anti-gay legislation and are later caught misbehaving in public restrooms?  The belief that your own nature is contrary to nature will inevitably twist you in painful, crippling knots.

But, just as inevitably, your true nature will assert itself.  It's a gift to know what you are and to love it.

Patting myself on the back a little more

In an earlier post, somewhere back in 2009, I stated that the so-called wisdom of old age is out of place in the young, and in fact, may be detrimental.  Nature provides all the wisdom a young person needs.

I love it when one of the greats agrees with my own wonderful ideas.  Don't you?  Here's Montaigne, from his essay, "Of repentance":

"[I]t seems to me that in old age our souls are subject to more troublesome ailments and imperfections than in our youth.  I used to say so when I was young; then they taunted me with my beardless chin.  I still say so now that my gray hair gives me authority to speak.  We call 'wisdom' the difficulty of our humors, our distaste for present things.  But in truth we do not so much abandon our vices as change them, and, in my opinion, for the worse.  Besides a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches when we have lost the use of them, I find there more envy, injustice, and malice.  Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces; and we never, or rarely, see a soul that in growing old does not come to smell sour and musty.  Man grows and dwindles in his entirety."

At the Reason Rally (briefly)

I've taken, lately, to browsing freethoughtblogs.com, and I happened to see that there would be a "Reason Rally" in Washington DC today, so I went on down in spite of the rain in the forecast.

I naturally feel a kinship with atheists, freethinkers, skeptics, humanists, etc., etc., but I normally shy away from joining any organizations.  Seems too much like church.  But I felt like I ought to add to their numbers, especially when the rain might keep those numbers down.

Compared to other rallies I've been to, this one was rather small, but nowhere near to being puny.  The estimate I heard was 30,000 people.  The organizers were calling it the largest gathering of its kind in the history of the world, but that's hard to imagine, although for all I know, it might be.

In any case, the list of speakers/performers included Richard Dawkins, Tim Minchin, Eddie Izzard, Adam Savage, James (the Amazing) Randi, Bad Religion, and others known mainly among humanist activists.  The "emcee" was Paul Provenza, and he lent a light, humorous tone to the proceedings.

To the Christians' credit, they braved the bad weather to voice their disapproval.

After I enjoyed the first few speakers, the rain started coming down pretty hard, and I suddenly became faint of heart and decided to bail.  It seemed the rational thing to do.  I had hoped to stay longer and do a little more celebrity spotting, but I guess I'm more of a fair weather atheist.  I was heartened to see, as I left, that lots more people were just showing up.

And I did happen to get a nice shot of James Randi.

Although I'm an unbeliever, I'm hesitant to point to religion as "the" problem.  Having been brought up in a liberal Christian tradition, I've seen the good things that the religious have done.  But the human race has its alpha dogs and bullies, and religion is probably the greatest tool in existence for maintaining subjection to authority.  We really need to loosen that stranglehold whenever and wherever we can.

Gertrude Stein's "Paris France"

I had read somewhere that Gertrude Stein's writing was difficult, but that's not the case here. Yes, she wrote run-on sentences that were short on punctuation, but the sentences are not hard to understand, except for the occasional one that can be read in more than one way because of poor grammar.

As I read "Paris France," I wondered about the style. Was it meant to be stream of consciousness, naive, childlike, like speech, or all of these? To me, the effect of the style was to make Gertrude Stein appear a simpleton.

"Foreigners belong in France because they have always been there and did what they had to do there and remained foreigners there. Foreigners should be foreigners and it is nice that foreigners are foreigners and that they inevitably are in Paris and in France."

I decided to check my reactions to the Stein style against others, and so Googled the book and read the Wikipedia entry, which describes "Paris France" as a novella. Now, I had considered it a memoir, and still do (the back cover of the paperback unhelpfully calls it "literature"). But it's funny that changing the genre from memoir to fiction can change one's opinion of the very same prose one was reading before the change in perception. As a novella, the writing in "Paris France" is more acceptable, if you consider that you have an unreliable narrator who is a little dim.

Gertrude Stein lived in France through both World Wars, but her treatment of them in this book seems to show her desire to distance herself from the wars as much as possible. Perhaps if you're in the middle of a war, it's natural to lie low and hope you live through it.

I confess that "Paris France" has caused me to think a lot, even if my first thoughts were about how little I liked it.

Render unto Caesar...

The answer to this silly birth control issue is so simple that I really need only one paragraph to solve it.  To require every employer who offers group insurance to its employees to include coverage for contraception in no way infringes on any person's religious freedom.  Nobody is required to use birth control.  Each woman can still follow her own conscience and not use contraception.  Simple as that.  That should be enough, but I know you won't be satisfied.

Monty, I hear you saying, if I believe that contraception is a sin, I shouldn't be forced to pay for anyone else's pills!

Well, there are a number of answers to that one.

First, the essence of group medical coverage is sharing the risk of others.  There are many, many benefits of your policy that you will never use.  Lucky you, but you still pay the same premium as anybody else.

And, frankly, the women who use birth control are doing you a favor by keeping costs down.  Every woman who uses birth control is saving you from sharing the cost of her giving birth to as many babies she might have had otherwise.  That's a lot of savings right there.

Finally, if the principle of not wanting to help women sin is so important to you, then you surely will be willing to go as far as going uninsured.

Atheists "live in isolation and secrecy?"

There is an interesting article in "Slate" today by Julian Baggini (reprinted from the "Financial Times"), wondering "Why won't the U.S. accept its atheists?"

Here's a link.  (Not sure how long it will be there.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/ft/2012/02/atheism_in_america_why_won_t_the_u_s_accept_its_atheists_.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_4


The point of the article is that atheists arouse more distrust here in America than other groups that are more or less widely reviled, including gays, Jews, and even Muslims.  Atheists are reluctant to tell their families, friends, or acquaintances about their unbelief.  The family of one woman in Texas don't want her babysitting their children; before they knew, she was welcome to do so, even though they knew she was a crack user at the time.


I had thought of this question only in the context of politics; that is, that an atheist has next to no chance of being elected president, for example.  But I hadn't considered myself to be discriminated against because of my unbelief.  In the light of Mr. Baggini's article, I realize that that's because I keep the fact to myself for the most part.  Being an atheist doesn't compel one to participate in any particular behavior that others might think sinful.  An atheist doesn't have to do anything at all, except to not believe in God.


So, as an aging white male who looks a lot like any other aging white male, I don't feel threatened.  As long as I keep my mouth shut.  I never told my own devout mother.  She must have noticed that I never went to church, and perhaps she never asked about my spiritual life in order to protect herself from worry.


I don't make a fuss about my atheism to my religious friends, but I've always told myself that that was out of politeness:  I didn't want to make them defend their belief to me.  If I came across as a scoffer (which I am, frankly), I might make them uncomfortable and lose their friendship.


In any case, although I don't feel isolated, I think the author has a point.  I live in an area of the country where atheism is a bit more common.  My wife is an atheist.  I have several atheist friends.  In short, I guess I have an adequate "support system."  But I imagine others may feel very alone.


When you're out driving, try counting the bumper stickers proudly proclaiming people's religious beliefs.  Lots of them, right?  One doesn't often see an atheist bumper sticker.  That would invite vandalism, after all.

Dear Evangelicals of Anoka,

Be not afraid.  There is no radical homosexual agenda.

If homosexuals have any agenda at all, it is that they be able to live their lives without being taunted, beaten up or killed.

If your child is naturally heterosexual, if he or she is attracted to the opposite sex, there is no danger that your child will be influenced to "try it out."  Homosexuality will simply not appeal to your child.  There is no such thing as recruitment.

If your child is naturally homosexual, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that, except perhaps to make your child miserable by trying to change him or her.  If your child is homosexual, he or she will seek other homosexuals out.  That's right.  That's a fact.  Your child will not be a victim of an evil influence.

If I may be permitted to use your own language, God made homosexuals, too.

You are afraid that allowing the teachers in public schools speak of homosexuality as "normal" will convince your straight children to try homosexual behavior.  It will not turn straight children into gay children.

Let's talk about the word "normal."  If a teacher says that homosexuality is normal, what the teacher means is that there are a certain number of people for whom attraction to the same sex is natural.  I think that what you are afraid of is that these teachers are saying is that everyone should try homosexuality, because it's natural for everyone.  It's not natural for heterosexuals, so that's one thing you don't need to worry about.

I am a straight man, and I have never been sexually attracted to any man.  None of the many homosexual friends I have known has ever made a pass at me, because they just know from my behavior that I'm not interested.

I know that you must be afraid of the Gay Straight Alliance organizations in your children's school.  But the GSA is not there to spread homosexuality.  The GSA is there because there are straight kids who care enough about their neighbors to help them get past the bullying without killing themselves.

Class war again

I once had a job as an operations supervisor in a computer installation.  Back then, the big mainframe computers needed operators to feed them the jobs that got the work done.  We pretty much all operate our own computers these days, but back then we needed specialists.

To be an operations supervisor was to be on the lowest rung of the management ladder.  Even so, part of the job was to treat the operators as children.  I was struck by the fact that these adults, many with children, and maybe even grandchildren of their own, were not considered to be responsible people with the ability to get to work on time and do their jobs without management's stern, watchful eye, aided by the punching of time cards.

In this country, where we deny the existence of social class, there are many strata.  I wonder about the folks at the top, and how they see the rest of us.

We are often told that an educational system that is strong in math and science makes America competitive in the world.  But does the emphasis on math and science to the detriment of art and music programs really reveal an attitude among the upper class that the purpose of public education is to provide them with a competent workforce?  Is the appreciation of the finer things merely for the children of the elite, who have the leisure to enjoy them?  Should the cogs in the machine really be bothering themselves with the higher intellectual pursuits?

I'll admit that I have not studied the super-rich.  They may be a peachy keen bunch who wish us all well.  But people who have more money than Mike Tyson could squander in a lifetime probably experience the world as a place full of people who either work for them or serve them in other capacities.  Do they value our inner lives?  Do they know we have them?  I wonder.

Santorum's Sharia

I don't suppose anyone will be able to dig up any dirt on Rick Santorum.  He seems to be the real thing, a rule-abiding advocate of theocracy.

Once upon a time, conservatives were against abortion, on the grounds that it is murder.  It's a sensible position if you believe abortion is murder.  Nowadays, though, some elements of the Right want to get rid of birth control, on the grounds that... it violates God's will.  I believe that I've rambled on about this subject before, pointing out that, by that logic, airplanes, medicine, and perhaps the squashing of cockroaches violate the will of a God who did not give us wings, who did give us diseases, and who didn't anticipate our aversion to certain of the less agreeable animals.

In any case, I wonder how long it would take, in a right-wing Christian theocracy, before special government agents began to make sure women were not wearing makeup.  I choose this particular example, because an Iranian friend of mine told me this was one of the little things that happened under the Ayatollah.

Once again, I say, don't scoff at me for comparing an officially Christian nation with an officially Muslim nation.  The impulse is the same.

Please tell me I'm wrong. And why.

The recent unearthing of Ron Paul's racism, as well as some of his recent comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act paint Libertarianism as a "whites only" concept.  Or, rather, Libertarians feel that other groups getting the right to exist as human beings in our society infringes on their right to live their lives exactly as they choose.  What rights have been lost?

A former co-worker of mine, a Libertarian, explained to me that he should have the right to choose who he associates with.  If a person doesn't want to associate with people of another race, he shouldn't have to, he reasoned.  Problem is, in order to not associate with people of other races, you have to exclude them from your workplace; you have to exclude them from your neighborhood.

Libertarianism would seem to be Libertarianism for the few.  No one will ever force you to admit a person of another race into your home socially, or to go to lunch with co-workers you don't want to lunch with.  I believe that that is as far as one's right of freedom of association goes.