New Dark Ages?
[Opposition to evolution] comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it’s slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.
But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don’t despair, these things pass.
["The Atheist", Salon Interview with Richard Dawkins by Gordy Slack, 28 April 2005.]
Patriotic Atheists
It's amazing how easy it is for some people, let's say some political "leaders" — okay, let's make that presidents and their presidential fathers, simply to write off big chunks of their citizenry.
This exchange is reported as taking place between G.H.W. Bush & Robert I. Sherman (a reporter for the American Atheist news journal) in 27 August 1987:
Sherman: What will you do to win the votes of the Americans who are atheists?
Bush:I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.
Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?
Bush: No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
Sherman (somewhat taken aback): Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?
Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists.
[from "Can George Bush, with impunity, state that atheists should not be considered either citizens or patriots? The History of the Issue", by Madalyn O'Hair.]
Of course, I had already been written of as gay by GHWB ("Not fit to clean the White House toilets" if memory serves correctly), so this was just icing on the conceptual disenfranchisement cake anyway.
But how can one reconcile the widely held perception that the current president (or the first papa, for that matter) are "men of principle", when their principles are so egregiously sucky? Why do so many people want to put all their trust in a men who find it so easy to come to the conclusion that certain groups of people are clearly not patriotic and probably shouldn't be allowed citizenship?
Update: How startling. Just minutes ago, which was itself only minutes after I'd read the above, I tripped over this quotation (via Shakespeare's Sister) from the televised news conference that the president held last night:
The great thing about America, David, is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want, and if you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. That's the wonderful thing about our country, and that's the way it should be.
I still have no reason to believe that he believes it, since this Bush is quite adept at saying things that have little to do with reality or with what he actually thinks, but it's still startling to hear [see] him say it.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!
A Star Explodes in Slow Motion
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this book by Peter Atkins (reference below), and I found his slow-motion description of the process that leads to the creation of a supernova uncommonly gripping and dramatic, as well as enlightening.
Stars bigger than about eight Suns have a violent future. The temperature in these giants can rise so much, to around 3 billion degrees, that "silicon burning" takes place, in which helium nuclei can merge with nuclei close to silicon and gradually build heavier elements, stepping through the periodic table and finally forming iron and nickel. These two elements have the most stable nuclei of all, and no futher nuclear fusion releases energy. At this stage, the star has an onion-like structure with the heaviest elements forming an iron core and the lighter elements in successive shells around it. The duration of each of these episodes depends critically on the mass of the star. For a star twenty times as massive as the Sun, the hydrogen-burning epoch lasts 10 million years, helium burning in the deep core then takes over and lasts a million years. Then fuels get burned seriously fast in the core. There, carbon burning is complete in 300 years, oxygen is gone in 200 days, and the silicon-burning phase that leads to iron is over in a weekend.
The temperature is now so high in the core, about 8 billion degrees, that the photons of radiation are sufficiently energetic and numerous that they can blast iron nuclei apart into protons and neutrons, so undoing the work of nucleosynthesis that has taken billions of years to achieve. This step removes energy from the core, which suddenly cools. The outer parts of the core are in free fall and their speed of collapse can reach nearly 70 thousand kilometres a second. Within a second, a volume the size of the Earth collapses to the size of London. That fantastically rapid collapse is too fast for the outer regions of the star to follow, so briefly the star is a hollow shell with the outer regions suspended high over the tiny collapsed core.
The collapsing inner core shrinks, then bounces out and sends a shockwave of neutrinos through the outer part of the core that is following it down. That shock heats the outer part of the core and loses energy by producing more shattering of the heavy nuclei that is passes through. Provided the outer core is not too thick, within 20 milliseconds of its beginning, the shock escapes to the outer parts of the star hanging in a great arch above the core, and drives the stellar material before it like a great spherical tsunami. As it reaches the surface the star shines with the brilliance of a billion Suns, outshining its galaxy as a Type II supernova, and stellar material is blasted off into space.
[Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, Peter Atkins (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003) pp. 256–257.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
His Humpty-Dumptiness
Watch in amazement as top US military spokesmen try to maintain that we are most definitely winning the war in Iraq (and have been for some time — probably averaging in our military successes for several years before the invasion).
Here is Donald Rumsfeld helping the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff maintain his wall of denial. Based on this alone I think Rumsfeld should be named our new Secretary of Humpty-Dumptiness (in the traditional, conventional Humpty-Dumpty context, of course).
"The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency," he said.
"So therefore winning or losing is not the issue, in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the word 'winning' and 'losing' in a war," he said.
["US admits Iraq insurgency undiminished", 27 April 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Microsoft's Tarnish
More about what one dispassionately hopes is a growing scandal for the Evil Giant (Microsoft):
Microsoft Corp. is paying social conservative Ralph Reed $20,000 a month as a consultant, triggering complaints that the well-connected Republican with close ties to the White House and to evangelist Pat Robertson may have persuaded the company to oppose gay rights legislation.
["Microsoft defends ties to Ralph Reed: Critics want conservative consultant fired", by Charles Pope, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 27 April 2005.]
It's easy to see that this piddling amount (piddling, that is, to Microsoft) is just to make sure that they don't get snubbed by Congressional leadership (thanks to warnings from — you guessed it! — Tom DeLay), but it's really impressive that they would choose the leading slimeball of the Faith-Based Hate Groups. If ever one needed a reason beyond crappy software to dislike MS, just finding out that they gave money to a creature like Reed would provide ample reason.
It's slightly entertaining as they explain that Reed never advised on "social issues", but only on "trade and competition issues". (How would that go… "So, your competitiveness is really going to suffer if people find out that you are homo lovers.")
I'm thinking that even I could provide a great deal of interesting "trade and competition" advice for $20k/month.
By this point, it's become mostly irrelevant whether Reed really had any influence in Microsoft's decision to back away from supporting anti-discrimination legislation in Washington, since it's all about perception and appearances, and their formerly glowing support of workplace diversity has now started to tarnish very quickly. Once lost, it's a hard thing to get back.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Christian Soldier Sexuality
It's about Jesus. But the fact that so much of the language used to discuss Christ is homoerotic is no coincidence. The first miracle of Jesus to believers is that his appeal crossed so many boundaries of the ancient world. Rich and poor, Jew and gentile, men and women — every kind of person loved him, and what's more, desired him. Theologians of far greater subtlety than Eldredge and Lundy suggest that while Christ was biologically male, his gender is harder to fix, since he held a literally erotic power over followers of all persuasions….
What's sad about books like God's Gift to Women is that they translate sexuality into codes of combat, and clichéd ones at that. The "enemy," of course, is Satan, but his names are legion: pornography, homosexuality, feminism, humanism, the monolithic foe Christian conservatives call, simply, "the culture."
[…]
But more shocking is Hagee's announcement that nearly every woman he's counseled over the years has told him that "It's really no big deal if I never have sex again with my husband." This makes sense only if one accepts the division of identity increasingly popular in evangelicaldom: young men are knights and young women are virginal maidens, and even after marriage that formula, in a sense, continues: Men must get dirty in battle, women must stay pure at home. Sex is for the fellas.
Some fellas respond to that "spiritual reality" by seeking out other fellas; guys, the thinking goes, are always up for a good time. The oversexed female as public enemy has been replaced by the oversexed male; and in the worst case scenario, he is gay. Or perhaps it is, for the Christian right, the best case scenario — as the 2004 election proved in the eleven states where conservative activists put anti-gay rights laws up for popular voting, rhetorical gay bashing has proven one of the most effective organizing tools in recent American political history.
[…]
Christian conservatives loathe all forms of homo- and bisexuality, of course, but it is the gay man (singular; he's an archetype) who looms largest in their books and sermons and blogs and cell group meetings. Not, for the most part, as a figure of evil, but one to be almost envied. "The gay man" is the new seductress sent by Satan to tempt the men of Christendom. He takes what he wants and loves whom he will and his life, in the imagination of Christian men's groups, is an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. He is thought to exist in the purest state of "manhood," which is boyhood, before there were girls.
["Sex as a Weapon: Decoding the Literature of the Christian Men's Movement", by Jeff Sharlet, 25 April 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Quantum Theory & GNP
I am reading Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, by Peter Atkins. It's refreshing reading.
Anyway, as I continue to fret about the current faith-based insurgency attacking science in America, I was struck by this comment of Mr. Atkins' about the effect of science on society:
…No exception to the predictions of quantum mechanics has ever been observed and no theory has been tested so intensively and to such high precision. The problem is that although we can use the theory with great skill and authority, despite a hundred years of argument no one quite know what it all means. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that 30 per cent of the GNP of the USA depends on applications of quantum mechanics in one form or another. That's not bad for a theory that no one understands.
[pp. 201–202.]
NB: The "Quantum Theory" has always been referred to as a Theory, and yet there seems to be no herds of salivating protesters demanding that books on "Quantum Theory" have stickers pointing out that it is just a "theory". Why is that?
It's odd how everybody and his cousin Joe can be an "expert" on Evolutionary Theory ("expert" = "critic" rather than "contributor", of course), just as they all turn into "experts" (same definition) on The Theory of Relativity when they get drunk, and yet there seem to be exceptionally few folk experts on The Quantum Theory. Why is that? (I myself have a few remarks to make in criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation, but the margins of this blog entry are too narrow to contain them.)
I don't know whether I'll accept the quoted "30 per cent" number so readily without knowing its source, but the point of the statement is still valid: modern technology, and our modern technologically enabled economy, are all built on the foundations of rational, humanistic science. "Faith-based science" may calm some atavistic anxieties, but it is not going to keep the airplanes in the air, or keep the television networks broadcasting, or keep our cars on the road, or keep our air conditioners cooling, or even keep our supermarket check-out lines moving (pace G.H.W. Bush).
I'm always surprised to see fundamentalists using cell phones, iPods, electricity, and all the innumerable other non-biblical fruits of the godless sciences that make modern life possible and sometimes even enjoyable. Is it ironic that the printing press that made their quaint book of creation myths a universal best seller is itself not mentioned in the book?
In passing, on p. 120, Mr. Atkins reminds us that there have been faith-based intiatives in science before when he describes how Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis came up with his "principle of least action" largely through theological musing on the perfection of the presumed creator; however, the theory was then subjected to scientific scrutiny and found applicable.
In: All, Speaking of Science, Splenetics
NPC ID "Debate"
Bob Park, a physicist who writes the brief "What's New" reports for the American Physical Society with a great deal of wit and withering obervation (archives here, subscribe here), apparently attended a recent press "event" at the National Press Club put on by the irrepressible [so-called] Design [so-called] Insitute:
EVOLUTION: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE FINDS A SCIENTIST TO DEBATE.
The National Press Club in Washington, DC is a good place to hold a press conference. If a group can make its message look like an important story, it can get national coverage. The message of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute is simple: "Intelligent Design is science." That’s bull feathers of course, but that’s why they have PR people. Science is what scientists do, so they gotta look like scientists. Nothing can make you look more like a scientist than to debate one. Scam artists all use the "debate ploy": perpetual-motion-machine inventors, magnet therapists, UFO conspiracy theorists, all of them. They win just by being on the same platform. So, the Discovery Institute paid for prominent biologist Will Provine, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences at Cornell, to travel to Washington to debate one of the Discovery Institute’s "kept" PhDs, Stephen Meyer, at the National Press Club on Wednesday. It was sparsely attended. Most were earnest, well-scrubbed, clean-cut young believers, who smiled, nodded in agreement and applauded at all the right times. The debate was not widely advertized. I’m not sure they really wanted a lot of hot-shot reporters asking hard questions. The only reporter was from UPI, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, a spiritual partner of the Discovery Institute. The next day I searched on Google for any coverage of the debate. The only story I could find was in the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by – the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
["What's New", by Robert Park, 22 April 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Whose Pyramid?
For one thing — probably because I'm one of those radicals who tend to think that MicroSoft is the evil empire (recently confirmed) — I've always turned my nose up at anything quaintly called "My_____", since it always sounds to me like an unwarrented intrusion into already decaying standards of discourse by the evil empire's marketing and it reminds me of all those stupid folders on my XP desktop that need to be named MyThis and MyThat and MyThose and MyThese. Mine! Mine! Mine!
Anyway….
So, there's all this fuss going on about the new MyPyramid guideline thingie proposed by the USDA to replace the previous Food Pyramid, the one that looked like an exploded pyramid with little bits of food inside and the reasonably clear message: eat relatively more of the stuff at the bottom and less of the stuff at the top.
This new MyPyramid (sounds like Barbie healing herself with mystical pyramid power) is pretty sucky. There is just so much inprecise and devious and big-money-evil going on with the thing that's it's hard to decide where to start with a critique, or how to criticize it without sounding totally beyond the fringe.
Sexism — Let's start with something easy. Evidently in order to emphasize the value of exercise in maintaining good health, the pyramid has introduced a little humanoid graphic running up some stairs on the side of the pyramid. Fortunately, the little person can be construed as colorless; unfortunately, the little person clearly has no breasts and is a male (either wearing trousers or naked, it's ambiguous). So, women really don't need to feel at all personally involved with good nutrition. Perhaps the little man is really meant as some sort of high priest of nutrition, hence restricted (as tradition demands) to being a guy. I'm also a little bothered that he has neither hands nor feet.
Goodbye "Fat"! — I remember hearing that certain food producers (therefore: lobbyists) were annoyed with the previous food pyramid that referred to "fats" as "fats", and suggested keeping one's daily intake of "fats" on the lean side. They felt that this made them look bad since their food products typically had lots and lots of "fats". Well, in this new era of cowtowing to big corporations while pretending not to, that annoying little problem has been taken care of.
The new pyramid now refers to "oils" instead of "fats". This would be confusing enough, but then the helpful website goes on to answer penetrating questions like "How are oils different from solid fats?" (it basically says they're the same, but in language so opaque that it makes them sound like two different things), and "Why is it important to consume oils?" (suggesting that "fats" were to be avoided but "oils" should be consumed with less concern). Phew.
More, Never Less — "Eat Less" is apparently too negative for food guidelines and not supportive enough of [lobbying] food corporations. The advice found for the Green ("Vegetables") slice of the pyramid gives these three pointers:
- Eat more dark green veggies
- Eat more orange veggies
- Eat more dry beans and peas
What in the world should we eat less of, purple and blue "veggies"? Will growers of "light green veggies" now feel slighted? I also wonder whether we are allowed to cook those "dry beans" or whether the really crunchy dry bean is better for us.
I find it interesting, too, that "peas and beans" appear in "Vegetables" and "Meats and Beans" categories. For some reason "meats" don't show up in "oils", although "fish" does.
Verbal Ambiguity — In the interest of cutsie mottoes, we end up with silly and ambiguous catch phrases for the different "food groups" like
- "Make Half Your Grains Whole" — how? By glueing them together, perhaps?
- "Vary Your Veggies" — Apparently one can do this by making them different attractive colors, like orange and dark green. Variety is a good thing in one's diet, but what does it have to do with balancing the intake of foodstuffs beyond beginning with the same letter as "veggies".
- "Focus on Fruits" — since I'm gay, I don't mind if we focus on "fruits" really, but as nutritional advice it's pretty empty. How does one do this? By staring at the fruit intently, perhaps repeating its name over and over in a soft voice to achieve a state of fruity nirvana? "Choose Fresh, Frozen, Dried, or Canned Fruit" they say. What are the other kinds and what's wrong with the other kinds? They also suggest that we "Go Easy on Fruit Juices" — how much fruit juice is "easy"?
Visual Dishonesty — This was what originally drew my ire when I first looked at the colorful MyPyramid. The visual dishonesty is enough to curdle the stomach of Edward Tufte (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information).
The colored segments representing the different "food groups" inside the MyPyramid are different sizes, with the obvious implication that one should try to eat from the different groups in proportion to the size of that group's colored segment. Thus we find that the segment for "oils" is small, but the segment for "grains" and "vegetables" is relatively large. However, the area of the various segments, which evidently are meant to represent the relative proportions we are to eat from various "food groups" are nearly impossible to compare, since they are little wedges inside the pyramid. The different colors don't help, except to make sure that the yellow "oils" stand out even though its wedge is so small.
This MyPyramid manages to be extraordinarily non-quantitative, almost gratuitously so. Its main message seems to be the diluted: "Eat more of everything except stuff you should eat less of."
I suppose it might be possible to get the whole pyramid hastily scuttled by pointing out that the colorful new pyramid uses 6 colors, the same 6 colors as the GAY rainbow flag, indicating that the new pyramid is actually part of the vast militant homosexual conspiracy for world domination through healthful eating or something. Fortunately, to work, the rumor wouldn't have to be very specific, since right-wing people of hate (or "faith-based hate groups", I haven't decided yet on new nomenclature) have very, very vivid imaginations.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Speaking of Science, Splenetics, Such Language!
Toxic Homo Fungus
The following tidbit, saved from an article I read some weeks ago, reinforces two well-known facts: 1) homosexuality is common in nature; 2) homosexuality can be toxic. The new spin on the old trick is that this time the guys (or gals) can have kids:
Same-sex mating found in toxic fungus
An infectious fungus has been found to defy the most basic tenet of sexual reproduction – that successful mating requires individuals of the opposite sex, according to Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers at Duke University Medical Center.
In the April 21, 2005, issue of Nature, the researchers reported that, in the infectious fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, members of the same "sex" can mate and produce offspring. Infection with the fungus can prove life-threatening in humans, and the findings might improve understanding of the fungal biology that underlies the infectious process, the researchers said. Discovery of the same-sex mating might also help elucidate basic principles governing the evolution of sex, they said. …
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Manifesting the Human Experience
Even as the heartland state [Kansas] was enshrining bigotry in its constitution [by passing an anti gay-marriage amendment], a bipartisan legislative majority in Connecticut this month approved same-sex civil unions — and, unlike the laws allowing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and civil unions in Vermont, this one was not in response to a court order.
More important, we continue to see public expressions of what I am calling the Finkelstein Phenomenon: The slow but inexorable societal acknowledgment that gay people are real people living real lives, not an abstraction or a subculture. And many of them are Republicans.
Arthur Finkelstein, for example, is an enormously effective right-wing GOP political operative who revealed recently that in December he took advantage of the groundbreaking and much-maligned Massachusetts law to marry his longtime partner. When asked why, he cited "visitation rights, healthcare benefits and other human relationship contracts."
Finkelstein, in the past, must have conveniently forgotten his own interests when he helped engineer the election of known conservative gay-bashers such as Jesse Helms. He represents–along with Dick Cheney's highly regarded lesbian daughter and the Log Cabin Republicans–yet another example for conservatives of how being gay is much more fundamental than a "lifestyle choice." In fact, it is just another manifestation of the human experience.
[excerpt from "GOP Gays and the 'Finkelstein Phenomenon' ", by Robert Scheer, The Nation, 20 April 2005.]
My Pointy Ears
I'm such a sucker these days for personal validation — I suspect it's a condition brought on by this over long period of being ungainfully unemployed. So, I could hardly resist the temptation to follow someone's pointer to the "How Logical Are You?" quiz. I took a few minutes and answered the 8 questions (which I thought didn't address so much how logical I was as how readily I could draw an appropriate Venn diagram, but who am I to argue?) and was delighted with the result:
You Are Incredibly Logical
(You got 100% of the questions right)
Move over Spock – you're the new master of logic
You think rationally, clearly, and quickly.
A seasoned problem solver, your mind is like a computer!
Obviously, I was going to be terribly disappointed if I hadn't gotten all the answers correct — but then, I wouldn't have mentioned it here, either.
This result comes as no surprise. No, I don't mean the "incredibly logical" bit so much as the "Move over Spock" bit.
Have I ever mentioned my ears? If you saw a picture of me now (follow some of the links to find pictures on our other websites), you'd wonder "what about his ears" since they look reasonably normal the way they are now.
The point is this: my ears have always been this size, but my head was much smaller when I was much younger.
So, when I was in grade school, I looked like a real dork and was frequently compared to Spock, even though my ears were not particularly pointy then, just prominent. It was no fun being made fun of all the time. (It was that much worse since I was branded early on as a fairy, although my own homosexual self-realization was years away.)
At one point my parents took me to consult some sort of plastic surgeon (I presume) about the possibility of having my ears "pinned back". It sounded okay, but by that point the cure seemed out of proportion to the problem. I decided, supported by my supportive parents, just to stick with the ears the way they were and grow into them. We were solid midwestern stock; that was how we dealt with things.
While I waited, I put my talents to good use by learning to wiggle my ears, both together and individually. I figured that if people were going to stare, I'd give them something amusing and disarming to stare at. It was empowering.
Things happened as we expected: eventually my head caught up with my ears and the youthful trauma receeded. I can still wiggle my ears, too, if I concentrate. Maybe I should add that to my resume.
No One Expected the German Inquisition
I have no more reason to talk about the new pope really than I did to talk about the previous one (they can always make more, no matter what happens), despite the fact that Isaac was convinced that this particular Bavarian homophobe would never be elected. (Sound familiar to any other elections we've been through recently? I wonder whether Diebold supplied any equipment to the College of Cardinals?)
Anyway, amidst all the fuss as everyone rushes in with an opinion, my spirits were unexpectedly buoyed to read this supportive statement by Shakespeare's Sister:
Da New Pope (as Ezra would say) doesn’t like da faggots. As anyone who’s spent more than five seconds hanging around this joint knows, here at Shakespeare’s Sister, we likes da faggots, and so we don’t likes da new pope.
What a nice thing to say, and written down with a period at the end without any "but" or other wimpy prevarication. She goes on to remind us that "Joey the Rat" (Isaac's pet name for him) was no subtle homo-hater. Rather, he penned all the worst, anti-gay rhetoric that was issued under the late pope's name encyclically.
He does a good job of blaming the victims in this twisted variant on the she-wanted-it dismissal levied so frequently against women who have been raped:
But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.
Shakespeare's Sister, in a potent antidote, concludes by saying:
I reject this pope, I reject his church, and I reject its teachings. I reject the notion that people I love are evil for being gay, or that any expression of love between two consenting adults is somehow sinful. There’s nothing sinful about love, and there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the way I love Mr. Shakes, and the way Pam loves Kate, and Mr. Furious loves Mr. Curious; I reject all claims to the contrary. And if that consigns my eternal soul to the fires of hell, then off I go, tra la la. I never fucking liked harps, anyway.
My heart soars.
Poseur Presidents & Prime Ministers
And, are there any Great Men in the world today? Where — this is a question I've been asked by several readers recently — are the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Titos, the Lloyd Georges, the Woodrow Wilsons, the de Gaulles and Clemenceaus?
Our present band of poseur presidents and prime ministers cannot come close. Bush may think he is Churchill — remember all that condemnation of Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement we had to suffer before we invaded Iraq? — but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone our Winston.
Bush Junior looks like a nerd while his friends — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest — actually look disreputable. French President Jacques Chirac would like to be a Great Man but his problem is that he can be mocked — see France's equivalent of Spitting Image. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has a worse impediment. He has become a mockery of himself. Blair's self-righteousness and self-regard would have earned him my dad's ultimate put-down of all pretentious men: that he was a twerp. And my dad, I should add, kept Churchill's portrait over the dining room fireplace.
[Excerpt from "Wanted: Great world leaders", by Robert Fisk ("British Columnist"), in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 April 2005.]
Antonin Scalia: Judicial Activist
Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.
[…]
The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting – it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument – it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.
When it comes to judicial activism, conservative judges are no better than liberal ones – and, it must be said, no worse. If conservatives are going to continue their war on the judiciary, though, they should be honest. They do not want to get rid of judicial activists, a standard that would bring down even Justice Scalia. They want to rid the courts of judges who disagree with them.
[Excerpt from"Psst … Justice Scalia … You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too", by Adam Cohen, New York Times, 19 April 2005.]
Too Rich for Democracy
In a letter to Joseph Milligan on April 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson explicitly suggested that if individuals became so rich that their wealth could influence or challenge government, then their wealth should be decreased upon their death. He wrote, "If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree…"
In this, he was making the same argument that the Framers of Pennsylvania tried to make when writing their constitution in 1776. As Kevin Phillips notes in his masterpiece book "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," a Sixteenth Article to the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights (that was only "narrowly defeated") declared: "an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind, and, therefore, every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property."
[From "How Rich is Too Rich For Democracy?", by Thom Hartmann.]
Don't Ask!
This statement confuses me:
At a crowded news conference, Mr. DeLay said he would not entertain questions about his political activities.
["DeLay Asks House Panel to Review Judges", by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, 14 April 2005.]
Since Mr. DeLay is a politician, what else would he talk about?
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
What a Slime-Mold Beetle!
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are now species of slime-mold beetles
U.S. President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not all get a library, airport or highway named after them. But each has a slime-mold beetle named in his honor.
Two former Cornell University entomologists who recently had the job of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles named three species that are new to science in the genus Agathidium for members of the U.S. administration. They are A. bushi Miller and Wheeler, A. cheneyi Miller and Wheeler and A. rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler. …
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Friendly Links / Dirty Pix
Arthur Silber, with personal finances on his mind, says (in "Dirty Pix Means Cable!")
…Anyway, that’s my pitch about this for today. Hit the tipjar, send a check via snail mail (write me for my address if you like), send positive thoughts my way, whatever works for you. …
And when I can get cable internet service, THEN you get lots of dirty pix! And then you’ll all be happy. … I’m also checking into BlogAds, which would be much better for me and much easier on contributors. To that end, I need to increase my traffic, though, the more the better. So friendly blogs should link to me three or four times a day, okay? Well, maybe not that much…
Alas, as attractive as the dirty pix might sound (and being gay myself, we stand a greater chance of sharing tastes), I myself am a casualty of the incredible prosperity brought to us by the current administration, and have been without steady income for three years. It seems that middle-aged rocket scientists are not much in demand at the moment. (I might as well plug my resumes and CV, which are linked on this page.) Let me know, too, if you hear of any good writing jobs. (And don't forget, if you need stories to go with the dirty pix, I can always put you in touch with Jay Neal….)
Perhaps, if I manage to find some positive cash flow, I'll be able to contribute monetarily and say thanks for provocative essays. I'm afraid, though, that until then (may it be soon, so our greyhounds don't starve!) I can only offer positive thoughts and the occasional link.
P.S. And what a coincidence! My birthday is coming up in just a couple of weeks.
Wisdom of Old Jokes
Old jokes seem to embody enduring truths for me, and sometimes their punch lines become mental summaries for many of the categories (conceptual file folders) into which I slot this and that bit of ridiculous information. (I was just talking yesterday with someone about the gag that ended a McDonald's TV commercial once: "Feet! You had feet!" — very useful when spending too much time with more-martyred-than-thou control queens.)
Anyway, here's a rhetorical question from The Baltimore Sun
He [House Majority Leader Tom DeLay] just can't seem to figure out, though, how to put to rest the flurry of ethics allegations now being hurled at him on almost a daily basis. He tried dismantling the House Ethics Committee, changing the subject to Terri Schiavo and launching an offensive against the federal judiciary. Yet the attacks against him have only intensified. He's fallen back on the familiar tactic of blaming the Democrats and liberal media, but that won't make the spotlight on him go away.
Doesn't that immediately bring to mind the "Doctor! It hurts when I do this" joke?
In seems incontrovertible that politicians, especially the current breed of Robber-Baron Republicans, in their undeniable moth-to-flame trajectories towards power, believe that they can get away with it, whatever the "it" happens to be for them that leads them to slip into denial about their own corruption. Didn't their mothers ever teach them that truth and honesty are the better course to follow? Sure, all of them think that they'll be able to remember their lies and keep them sorted, that they won't be the ones to get caught. Most of them may even be correct, but they're still not right.
Since I've become such a liberal-pinko-homo-* partisan now though, I tend to go along with those who'd prefer to see DeLay not give up too easily. Inflating him even further as the iconic hot-air balloon leading the Republican parade could be quite damaging to them — a good thing. Using DeLay as the change-of-subject for a failed social-security reform campaing may be surprising but useful. Forcing fellow Republicans to swear fealty oaths should keep them careening down the slippery slope for months to come.
The longer they're embroiled in the relatively innocuous but ultimately pointless pasttime of trying to make Delay look like an honest politician, the less time they devote to destroying American governance in less obvious ways.
Wouldn't it just be easier not to do it in the first place?