I Have a Dream

42 years ago today, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in our nation's capital for an enormous civil rights march. He delivered one of the most famous speeches, a beacon of inspiration that shines forth as brightly today as it did in 1963.

This speech should not be invoked lightly. "I have a dream ... of free toppings with every ice cream sundae" is nothing short of sacrilege. "I have a dream ... of gasoline under $2 a gallon," even moreso.

I have a dream ... of a nation in which the bank of justice is not bankrupt, that the state of Texas will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice, that one day soon all of God's children, American and Iraqi, Christian and Moslem, Jews and Palestinians, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" — adapted from MLK's speech on 1963-08-28; see or hear the original speech

Here's an actual quote from MLK:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963

We again face "the fierce urgency of Now," and must make real the promises of a good and moral nation, in order to walk the sunlit path of worldwide justice and peace.

By the way, "Now" would also be a good time for the United States to rise from the quicksands of racial injustice within our own borders, too. "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

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LIVE from Crawford

I'm sitting in the big (nay, HUGE) tent at Camp Casey II on the outskirts of Crawford, Texas. Cindy Sheehan is somewhere around, although I haven't yet met her. Reverend Al Sharpton made a personal appearance to give his support on this 42nd anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C.

Our morning began with an ecumenical service, with speakers representing Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Moslem, Buddhist, and Unitarian beliefs, plus an outreach to people of no particular religious faith who also stand for peace, followed by Kaddish (traditional Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead) and Rev. Sharpton.

I got to speak with Nebeil Al-Uboudi, an Iraqi-American who was one of the two Muslim speakers. He was wearing a Houston Astros t-shirt, for his new hometown team, but he spoke of the values of peace and compassion that are at the root of his Islamic faith. Moslems believe that God commands them to respect people of other faiths. In the 15th century, a pretty dark period in European history, Jews found refuge in Moslem lands. Even today, non-Muslims can opt out of mandatory military service in many Islamic countries, although many choose to serve anyway. In Najaf, when the people went in to clean the bodies of the dead insurgents to prepare them for burial, they found many men who were not circumcised — they were Christians who fought alongside their fellow Iraqis against a foreign occupation.

A rabbi opened with a few observations about the commendation "Blessed are the peacemakers." The Protestant speaker, an ordained Presbyterian minister, echoed those words, adding that the Presbyterian Church has ruled the Iraq war to be illegal, as has the United Methodist Church, of which George W. Bush is a member. [In fact, Bush is still a member of Highland Park U.M.C. in Dallas, the very church in which I was confirmed three decades ago.] Next the Catholic priest spoke about the Church's commitment to peace and justice.

Yesterday, I spoke with Jeff Key, a United States Marine, in every respect the sort of Marine you'd expect to see on a recruiting commercial. I didn't have to ask how much he can bench press to tell you he's in excellent physical condition, but he's also a thoughtful, intelligent, patriotic American. When America does need defending, he's one of the people I want in the thick of things. Trouble is, he's gay, and he said so on CNN. He currently has "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" proceedings pending to kick him out with a dishonorable discharge. He is also getting vocal about his view that the Iraq war is the wrong war, being mismanaged by people who don't know what they're doing. Of course, what does Jeff Key know about the war in Iraq? After all, he just served there. He didn't fly in to carve turkey for Thanksgiving or stand on a stage in front of a black helicopter, he just wore a uniform and fought.

I also met up with some folks from Victoria, Texas, a town one county over from my mother's ancestral stomping grounds. It's about as "red" as "Bush Country" gets, with the few (shh!) Democrats mostly too intimidated to let their presence be known. There were two of them with a sign, though, so if you're a Democrat in Victoria County or the central coast area of Texas, I can tell you personally that you are not alone!

Last night, as things were beginning to wind down, a thunderstorm (a "blue Norther'" as we call them in these here parts) was lurking in the vicinity. After several hours of treating us to some spectacular lightning shows off in the distance, but otherwise leaving us to our barbecue and iced tea. Suddenly, the temperature dropped from almost 40° (104°F) to about 25° (77°F) and the wind kicked into high gear. Not Katrina gear, thank goodness, but high enough to knock over some of the smaller tents along the periphery of the big tent. People who had been sitting in post-brisket torpor leapt up to help batten the hatches. A lull in the wind came just at sundown, allowing for a moving "Taps" ceremony amidst the field of crosses representing the fallen soldiers of this war.

I claim on this blog that I am neither Left nor Right, but I'm decidedly opposed to the Right-wing extremists currently in power in the United States. Still, I don't stand in opposition to everything they (claim to) stand for. On the way into Crawford, I saw signs announcing "Support Our Troops!" and "Pro-AMERICA Rally," but I didn't see one single person in Camp Casey who doesn't support the troops, or who doesn't love America. Indeed, it is precisely our support for the troops and our love of country that motivates us to come out into the sweltering heat of August in Texas. I believe that there are situations where war cannot be avoided. I think that World War II was a "just and noble cause" — for the Allies, at least. However, I believe that LBJ lied to get us deeper into the Vietnam War, and I believe that George W. Bush lied to get us into what promises to be a decade-long misadventure in Iraq. Our presence there is neither just nor noble, and the sacrifice of human lives in the pursuit of a personal vendetta is NOT worthwhile.

Right now, though, I'm listening to The Brad Show, webcasting live from a table three metres away. He's currently interviewing former Congressman Tom Andrews (D–ME), now National Director of Win Without War. Go ahead and open another browser window, but check back here for updates later in the afternoon.

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The Punk Kid Never Cleans Up His Own Mess

Lately I've been thinking about the character traits of George W. Bush that have led to his utter incapacity to cope with the reality of the situation in Iraq. It is certainly important that he is a bully and a punk and a spoiled brat and an alcoholic and a drug addict, but there's more to it than that.

George W. Bush's life is a series of dismal failures in which he never once had to suffer the consequences. He was a failure as a student, but he went on to Yale and Harvard. He was a failure as an athlete, so he became a cheerleader — the very model of masculine prowess for a boy from west Texas. He was a failure as a fighter pilot, but never even suffered the consequences of going AWOL. He was a failure as a political candidate in Midland, and even moreso as a businessman, but his daddy's friends bailed him out. He was a lousy governor by any measure, but he was wildly popular and easily won re-election, even though he ran the state into the ground. He even tried to take credit for Texas' Patients' Bill of Rights, even though he refused to sign it. He lost the 2000 election, both in the popular vote and in the electoral college, but won the Presidency thanks to partisan maneuvers by his lackeys, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and five Supreme Court justices. In 2004, he managed to intimidate the so-called "legitimate press" into waiting until after the election to give any significant coverage of serious scandals that go to the heart of his administration. He has never been successful by his own efforts, nor has he ever paid the price of his own magnificent failures.

The strategy that has served Bush well throughout his life is simple:

• Life is a poker game.
• Always bet big. Go for the gusto, baby!
  
• Never show fear.
• Never concede even the tiniest setback. If you lose a hand, find some way to pretend that you actually won.
• If that doesn't work, have someone bail you out with several times the chips you just lost.

Problem is, Bush has bet the entire United States on his all-or-nothing games with the economy and of course the Iraq war. If the Iraq war had only added hundreds of billions of dollars to an already crushing public debt, it would still be a damned shame, but it has also cost the lives of thousands of Americans as well as losing America's claim to any sort of moral authority in the world.

He's bet big, and he refuses to admit that even so much as a minor course correction might be called for. We are making America and the world safer by building a free and stable Iraq. Clearly he believes that if he closes his eyes and says the magic words over and over again, he will open his eyes to see that his wish has come true. If that doesn't work out, Daddy, or some of Daddy's friends, or that nice Tony Blair, or Laura, or somebody will come along and set everything right — at least set everything right for Dubya.

We know for a fact, by his own admission, that George W. Bush is an alcoholic and that he has used illegal drugs. We have persistent rumors that he has used other illegal drugs. We also know from his own admission that he has never done any sort of formal detox program, nor 12-step program, nor any other organized addiction recovery program of any kind. He just woke up one day and let Jesus take away the addictions. Well, what if the addictions are still there? Dubya certainly acts like a gambling addict in the way he plays the game of politics. He also looks and acts a lot like someone whose addiction to alcohol and other drugs is anything but dormant. How much alcohol has George W. Bush consumed since January 20, 2001? How much cocaine? How much of what other illegal drugs? How much of various psychoactive prescription drugs? I believe that the American people have a right to know. That's not to say that the President has no right to privacy, but rather that the people have a right to know if chemicals of any sort are impairing (or enhancing) his ability to perform his duties.

It is an axiom of 12-step programs that an addict has to "hit bottom" before he can begin the road to recovery. Various people have continuously insulated Dubya from hitting that bottom, with the result that he has never even begun his addiction recovery. Now he has succeeded in creating such a colossal mess that there's no one who can wave the magic wand to make it all bright and shiny again. Not even Turd Blossom can help now, especially since T.B. has some problems of his own to worry about.

I wouldn't be at all happy about cleaning up Dubya's puke after a night of binge drinking. I'm even less happy at the thought of how many years it will take to undo the damage that his Presidency has done to our nation.

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Signs of Hope in the Waco Trib

Today's edition of the Waco Tribune-Herald has a Religion page, with a guest column by Al Siddiq, a leader of Waco's Muslim-American community, entitled "Dialogue can overcome negative images of Islam." It's a breath of fresh air in the midst of the hunkered-down mentality I so often see in this part of Texas.

Siddiq points out that Eric Rudolph was not branded a "Christian terrorist," nor are the IRA terrorists branded as Catholic.

Bin Laden is politically motivated; he is not a religious scholar. Yet Bin Laden and other terrorists are presented as though they speak for all Muslims. A turban and a beard do not qualify a person to speak on our behalf.

Siddiq goes on to tell about many patriotic Muslim-Americans, including himself, who have served or are serving in the U.S. military, and to dispel the untruths to which many people cling concerning the Quran [Koran, etc.].

There are many who criticize the Quran and call it a book of violence. There are many passages in the Bible and the Torah that, if taken out of context, would sound just as bad. Yet the Quran teaches us never to ridicule the religious beliefs of others. "And insult not those whom they worship beside God, lest they insult God wrongfully without knowledge. ..." (Surah 6:108) "Those who believe in (Quran) and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures) and the Christians and the Sabians, and who believe in God, and the last day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward." (Surah 2:62) ... It is the duty of Muslim-Americans to undertake the mission of building bridges of understanding between themselves and the rest of their fellow citizens in this free society. This can happen only when mainstream Muslim groups [such as the Islamic Center of Waco] actively engage the media and the policymakers of this land. — Al Siddiq, 2005-08-27, Waco Tribune-Herald page 6B

I think I'll stop by the Islamic Center of Waco while I'm in town and see if I can talk to Mr. Siddiq.

[Geeky Star Trek non-sequitur: On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dr. Bashir was played by Siddig El Fadil, who changed his name mid-series to Alexander Siddig.]

By the way, next week's guest column on the Religion page is by the Rev. Charley Garrison, pastor of Central Texas Metropolitan Community Church From The Heart. Yet another sign of hope in Waco.

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The Unintended Consequence of Laws

I'm in Texas, and lo and behold, the local paper (Waco Tribune-Herald) has yet another story about the unintended consequences of a law passed by the Texas Legislature. This time around, the "Lege" (as Molly Ivins calls it) has added a new category to the death penalty. The intent of the law was to require parental consent (not just notification) before a minor gets an abortion, and to restrict late-term abortions. However, in combination with a 2003 change in the definition of an individual in homicide statutes (previously "a human being who has been born and is alive"; now "a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation, from fertilization until birth"), makes a doctor who performs any illegal abortion eligible for the death penalty. Zowie.

This follows on the heels of the Lege's efforts earlier in 2005 to outlaw heterosexual marriage. The idea, of course, was to protect heterosexual marriage from the horrific threat of lesbians having a legal marriage from which to adopt cats children. However, the bill sought to outlaw any marriage-like arrangement. Not any same-sex arrangement, but any arrangement.

Yes, this is also the same state that makes possession of one dildo a misdemeanor and possession of six or more a felony. Efforts to repeal the silly statute have been rebuffed.

For those of you in my adopted state of California (where I've now spent almost half my life), keep this in mind the next time you think about "sending a message" by voting for some initiative, or worse yet, amendment to the state constitution. Are you sure, just from reading a half-page ballot summary, that the initiative will really send the "message" you wanted?

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Please, give me a SIGN!

I drove down to Crawford today. Just north of Waco, I was feeling a bit hungry. Waco used to have a fabulous local landmark called Leslie's Chicken Shack. It's been gone for several years now, but I figured I would honor its memory with some fried chicken. I was weighing the merits of KFC versus Popeye's versus Church's when a billboard arose from the side of the interstate and spake unto me. No, it wasn't "Eat Here and Get Gas"; that's been done.

[Bush's™ Chicken! is a trademark of somebody or other (i.e., "its respective owner") who is probably not related to President Bush, and whose position on Bush's Presidency, policies, and (lack of) military service I do not pretend to know.]

What better omen for my trip to Crawford! I made sure to save my styrofoam cup; I think it will be quite popular at Camp Casey tomorrow.

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85 years of suffrage

August 26, 1920, women in America gained the right to vote. Eighty-five years later, I say three cheers for that significant achievement, but now get yourselves back barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen where you belong, poppin' out more babies to die serve in President Bush's next little war. That's the message I'll be carrying to Camp Casey, you betcha.

The history of women's suffrage [right to vote] is actually rather more complex than just Susan B. Anthony marching in the streets, demanding a coin that looks just like a quarter. Women actually had the right to vote in several states at the time of the founding of our Republic, but gradually lost that right in the 19th century. It wasn't until 1868 that voting citizens were defined as male. Back in 1911, Mrs. Arthur Dodge, the intellectual forerunner of Phyllis Schlafly, formed the National Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage, or N.A.O.W.S. (pronounced "NOW") to promote the inalienable right of a woman to get married and not own property in her own name, or something like that. I gather it's very popular in certain parts of Iraq today.

One last jab at Susan B.: how do you tell the difference between a quarter and a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin? Easy — if it has a picture of a woman, that's George Washington on the quarter; if it has a picture of a drag queen with a bad wig, that's Susan B. Anthony.

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Greetings from Texas

Despite my very best attempts (with much help from BART) to miss my flight, and despite American Airlines' very best attempts to have the plane sit in the middle of a taxiway waiting until hell freezes over reason prevails in American politics a gate with a correctly functioning jetway became available, I and my little rental car are now in Texas, heading tomorrow for Crawford.

Tonight I am in Fichita Waffles Wichita Falls, visiting a lifelong friend who is also a friend of this blog. Tomorrow, armed with my "Pave the Planet" t-shirt and my "Pro-America, Anti-Bush" button and my "God Bless the Rest of the World Too" bumper sticker, I shall venture forth, forgoing the Dr. Pepper museum, to the west side of Waco. I shall find Camp Casey, or I shall drive around lost for a very long time trying to find Camp Casey. It's supposed to be a relatively cool day tomorrow, only about 101°F (38°C). This time of year in Texas, we call that chilly.

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Murder in the name of Christ

THOU SHALT NOT KILL*

* unless thy victim shall have sympathies with Fidel Castro, and/or the 5th-largest petroleum reserves on the planet, and/or a disagreement with the man whom God Himself installed as your leader here on Earth.

It seems that alleged televangelist Pat Robertson has taken it upon himself to amend the Ten Commandments. And you thought they'd stop with trying to amend the Constitution! Ha!!

You see, Pat Robertson has decided, in his infinite godly wisdom, that the right and moral and Christian thing for the United States to do, in order to promote our moral leadership around the world, is to assassinate the democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. I'm not talking "democratically elected" in the fashion of Saddam, Stalin, Mao, or Bush; I'm talking about someone who actually legitimately won a fair election. Maybe you don't like the policies he pursues. That's your right, and as an American you are free to voice that opinion. However, unless you're a Venezuelan citizen, that's the extent of your rights in the matter, and even if you're Venezuelan, you still don't have the right to assassinate him.

This isn't some little sexual pecadillo, like getting busy with prostitutes in a cheap motel while preaching sexual fidelity in monogamous marriage. We're talking big-time hypocrisy here. If Jimmy Bakker was defrocked for his Sins, then, boy howdy, Pat Robertson has no business ever calling himself "Reverend" again.

Of course, before I got this message posted to my blog, there's that rapscallion Jon Stewart telling you all about it on television, so let me give you a bit more background.

In 2002, there was a coup d'etat (or, in French, "coup d'état") in Venezuela. The United States government, or at least some minor functionary named George Walker Bush, immediately congratulated the right-wing junta that seized power from the legitimate government. There's also the ever-so-slightly inconvenient fact that the Bush administration encouraged and supported the coup even before the fact, not to mention that Chávez was returned to power only two days later. President Chávez has the audacity to accuse the U.S. government of trying to get rid of him by force, just because it's true! Shameful! Dare I say it — sinful!!

And so along comes a man of the Cloth, a man with a direct uplink to the mind of God, Pat Robertson. (It has been my pleasure to ridicule Pat Robertson in private for over thirty years, ever since I first saw The 700 Club on the CBN's station in Dallas, KXTX [no longer a CBN affiliate]. They were so committed to their Christian principles that they wouldn't show six episodes of the original Star Trek series due to "Satanic content." [Wolf in the Fold, Catspaw, And the Children Shall Lead, Where No Man Has Gone Before, and two others lost in the fog of a time portal just the other side of Alpha Centauri.] But now it will be my great pleasure to watch earnest right-wing so-called Christians trip over themselves, trying to pretend that Pat Robertson is either sane or Christian, much less both.)

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop. ... We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives [like Valerie Plame?] do the job and then get it over with. — "Reverend" Pat Robertson, "Christian" Broadcasting Network, Monday, August 22, 2005

As you've no doubt noticed by now, I'm a bit of a math geek, so, Let's do the math! One human life (foreigner, probably Catholic but clearly not a "true [Republican] Christian") is worth about $200 billion? Or is that only because he's a foreign leader? Where do I plug the value of the oil supplies into the equation? Should I use simple algebra or something fancier? I mean, if Robertson has a direct line to God, then we should at least use something a little more sophisticated than x + y = z. Mr. Psi, fire up the bra's and the ket's and get ready to go quantum!

Well, either that or Pat Robertson is a bat-shit insane servant of Satan for even suggesting such a thing.

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I've never been to Crawford, Texas

In all my travels, despite spending a large chunk of my life within frog-spittin' distance, I ain't never been to Crawford, Texas. I was born (at a very early age) across the street from the Alamo, where the Yankee carpetbaggers held out to the last man against the good Texans. (Strangely, that's not quite the spin the event got in my Texas history class in junior high.) I spent my early childhood in Houston, learning that on a humid summer day the sweat trickling down your torso was just like superglue, sticking your arms to your sides so firmly that you had to rip off a layer of skin to pry them off. We then moved to Dallas, where my vocabulary expanded rapidly (most especially my four-letter vocabulary — maybe that's where Dick Cheney and Dubya picked up some of their "colorful expressions" that they try not to let the press hear). Much of my family still lives in Texas, although even their loyalty to the good "pro-business" Republican hegemony is showing serious signs of strain. When the Republicans start putting snooping into people's bedrooms ahead of a healthy economy, they lose support.

We'll see what I can come up with this afternoon, but I'm looking seriously at being a good little jet-setter and flying off to D/FW and driving down to Wacko on my way to Crawfishord.

After all, what better way to show my resistance to a war for cheap oil than by expending who knows how many pounds of jet fuel (at just under 454 grams per pound!) and then renting a car to drive around the countryside of my native state! Viva el acondicionador de aire! (If ya cain't figger that one out, li'l Dubya, well, just ask Laura to read it to you.)

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Fun with Drugs on the Daily Show

Some people wax rhapsodic about a particularly good meal they had eight months ago. They're called "French." Other people have the next best thing to spontaneous orgasm when remembering an exquisite vintage wine. Many of them are also called "French," but others live in places like Napa Valley, Australia, and even New Mexico.

Me, I feel at one with the universe when I watch an especially sharp Daily Show, or the Real Time with Bill Maher on my birthday, marking the end of a three-month drought with a flourish. (Asa Hutchinson did a fair job of making a fool of himself, but he was nothing compared to conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly or "twitty" rising conservative star Kellyanne Conway. Chris Rock was truly in top form, and considering that 95% of most comedians would be a slump for him, I mean that as high praise.) And now those devils at Comedy Central are adding to my must-TiVo list. This new D. L. Hughley show definitely looks promising, and of course Showtime has added Weeds to its already impressive line-up.

There was this shocking little exchange in tonight's Daily Show:

dialogue between two Republican Senators (heavily paraphrased)
Chuck Hagel (Nebraska): We're not winning in Iraq. We can't even secure the road from downtown Baghdad to the airport. We're bogged down like we were in Vietnam.

George Allen (Virginia): There's a big difference with Vietnam. In Vietnam, the opposition had a philosophy, an organization, and a government (so to speak). In Iraq, the enemy is just there to wreak havoc. [As Jon Stewart points out, there's someone there there was someone in Vietnam to attack or negotiate with.] The fragmented army in Iraq (Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, with various sub-factions and de facto warlords) is really very much like the situation in the United States, with the main U.S. Army and also Andy Taylor and Barney Fife and maybe occasionally Gomer Pyle. The level of cooperation among rival factions in the Iraqi so-called military is comparable to the cooperation between the NYPD and the FBI.

Here's a little quote from tonight's Daily Show that zoomed by so fast even the closed captions folks couldn't keep up. Thanks to the miracle of ten-second instant replay, then...

"Jagged Liable Pill" (story about the Vioxx verdict in Texas)
ROB CORDDRY: That's right, Jon, I deal in the subject of drugs, pushing education on people. Also, I'm totally holding.

JON STEWART: Rob, this is stunning: $253 million verdict. In your mind, what impact is this gonna have on American business?

RC: Jon, it's a milestone in corporate history. This victory for the plaintiffs ensures companies will never again act with such disregard for their customers. Warning: actual verdict may be overturned or substantially reduced on appeal. Texas Law [indistinct] $26.1 million. Corporations hold strong incentives to manipulate the consumer, give them diarrhea.

...

RC: If a pharmaceutical company advertises a prescription drug but doesn't say what it does, the FDA doesn't make them list the side effects. That's why the TV spots for the drugs I just mentioned [Fosamax® (has something to do with osteoporosis) and Crixivan® (a protease inhibitor to fight HIV — but be sure to read the part about "Crix belly")] don't give the foggiest indication of what those pills do, other than help old people ride tandem bicycles. But Jon, I've been taking Crixivan^®, Escobar(?), and Facoges(?) for years.

[This web site does not give anything remotely resembling professional medical advice. If you take most any prescription medication without consulting a doctor, you are a damned fool. For example, if you take Crixivan^®, you can take Lipitor^® or Crestor^®, but not Mevacor^® or Zocor^®, assuming you don't have some other risk factor or combination of meds, like mixing Lipitor^® with certain diabetes drugs, for instance. More free amateur medical advice: if you don't finish your antibiotics when you get them prescribed to you, and you save them until you have a cold or flu, you're not only a damned fool, you're a doubly damned fool. The odds are that you have done harm to your body's ability to get better, not once but twice.]

The show goes on, though. The guest is Fox News anchor Chris Wallace (apparently he's not the love child of Mike Wallace and Chris Rock!). After yammering about how Steve Carrell is a "bigger" Star than Jon Stewart, he acknowledges that the Iraqi constitution is hopeless at this point. (Indeed, on Real Time, Kellyanne Conway Twitty compares the American Founding Fathers to the leaders today in Iraq — never mind that it took 11 years from the Declaration of Independence, which we orchestrated ourselves with our own leadership, to the Constitution, that we fought over and made difficult compromises on little issues like slavery. Catch Real Time on HBO for the remainder of this week.)

Then he talks about Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who has been camping near President Bush's ranch in Texas. Basically, the press corps was bored and Cindy Sheehan was there, so they interviewed her, but she struck a resonance because she "tapped into a concern that people have about how things are going." Or, as Jon Stewart puts it, "Shouldn't we be having a conversation about the competence of the Bush administration, because at every stage, they seem to have been wrong? How can we trust them to be the ones to pull this off?"

Jon Stewart hit the nail on the head when he said that Bush is just holding on and closing his eyes in hopes that his successor will clean up the mess.

Chris Wallace asks, "Don't you think it would send a terrible signal to the world if we just up and left?"

NO!!!

The center of the problem is an issue that came up clearly during the election campaign. George W. Bush is congenitally incapable of admitting to any error, no matter how trivial. What America needs right now is a President who can stand up and say, "Yes, I miscalculated about Iraq. I was wrong when I said that they had WMD's. I drastically underestimated the cost to both the American people and the Iraqi people of my adventure of forcing régime change on Iraq, ready or not. Furthermore, the continued American presence only inflames the situation, so we're getting out. We hope to hell that the Iraqis can sort this out, perhaps with some help from neutral outside parties. Go negotiate in Geneva, but Iraq will fare no better as a puppet to Iranian ayatollahs or the Taliban or al Qaeda sympathizers than as a minion of the almighty American Christian Empire, so you'd better be sure that the solution serves the people of Iraq."

P.S. I haven't yet gotten to the fresh Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, but it's sitting on my TiVo^®. I will savor the anticipation. Stay tuned.

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The DEA can count, sort of

I was reading the news online tonight, and I was particularly struck by this quote:

The agency [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] calculates that 454 grams of methamphetamine produces one pound of product and a single gram is enough for one hit. The DEA said those figures are on the high end of methamphetamine use. — AP wire service; stringer's name omitted to protect the anonymity of my source

Well, isn't that remarkable. Last time I checked, 454 grams of something produces a pound of that something with about 407½ milligrams left over. (Hey, that last .00008 gram — that's on the house.) In other words, the progress of the federal government's so-called War on Drugs is so fantastic that they have finally figured out that a pound of something is a little less than half a kilo! Wow!!

Permit me to give some additional pointers to the gummint officials in this last bastion of non-metricness on the planet. A litre, also spelled liter just to be persnickety, is about half the size of a two-liter Pepsi bottle. In fact, it's almost exactly the same size as one of those one-liter Mountain Dews that are so good for staying awake on the Interstate if you can't stand the smell of coffee. Of course, if you get one of those 20-ounce bottles, you're on your own, 'cause that's even more than an Imperial pint, whether of Guinness or of other liquid. Your good old 12-ounce can, now that's a little more than a third of a litre, but it'll also spill on your lap while you're driving and make you smack into the back end of an SUV, besides making it look like you peed your pants. Theoretically speaking, that is.

You do need to be a bit careful about pints and especially gallons, though, because there are two different brands, Imperial and American. Think of it like Coke and Pepsi, only they're different sizes instead of different colors. The Imperial fluid ounce is actually smaller than the U.S. fluid ounce, but yet there are more of them to a pint or a gallon. Are you confused yet? Let me put it this way: when that nice tour guide the other day was saying that something was so-and-so many litres, "or divide by 4½ to get gallons," he made a boo-boo, because a U.S. gallon is only about 3.78541176 litres, give or take a few molecules, and referring to an Imperial gallon in the 21st century — well, that's just downright quaint.

Since we're actually talking about three systems of measurement here — American, Imperial, and the entire rest of humanity — I should perhaps do a little side-by-side comparison of some useful conversion formulæ for estimating weight. Take water, for example. If your waterbed holds 617.32758 litres of water, and if we pretend that you're sleeping at Standard Temperature and Pressure, then that water will weigh exactly 617.32758 kilograms, not counting the algaecide. Better yet, you can figure out the exact number of liters in the bed by measuring its length, width, and height in decimeters (units of 10 cm) and multiplying them together to get volume in liters.

On the other hand, if you have a container that holds 10.000 Imperial gallons, since 1824, that would be exactly 100.00 pounds avoirdupois. But if you have one U.S. gallon of water for your trip to Burning Man, that would be exactly 231 cubic inches, or exactly 6 x 7 x 5½ inches, or about 6.135792439662 inches on a side, and it will weigh 8 pounds, 5.792 ounces, because Queen Anne thought wine tasted nicer than ale back in the way olden days, and everyone knows how loyal 21st-century Americans are to early 18th-century English monarchs. And they say Americans have no sense of tradition!

By the way, a hectare is exactly 100 metres on a side, or 1/100 of a square kilometre. An acre, on the other hand, is exactly 1/640 of a square mile, or 208 feet, 8.523906853 inches on a side (0r 165 feet by 264 feet). Perhaps more useful is to know that 1 hectare is about 2½ acres, or 1 acre is about 0.4 hectares. 40 acres and a mule is a smidge over 16 hectares plus an animal.

What is my point exactly? Having just spent six weeks travelling in the Rest of the World, I really have to stop and wonder why America wastes so incredibly much time and energy focused on these antique units of measure, If we just go metric, like every single other scrap of land on the planet, then we won't need all these silly conversion factors any more. A meter will simply be a metre with a variant spelling, and 454 grams will return to its rightful role as a little less than half a kilo. (For the benefit of those travelling to Amsterdam, an eighth of an ounce is just over 3½ grams.)

Many of you are thinking to yourselves, but wait, there's, like, a war going on, and you're yammering about the metric system, and yet you have the audacity to say that President Bush is out of touch with everyday reality. Well, yes. Our unthinking devotion to an insane system of measurement whose only virtue is that we already use it, is an eerily apt metaphor for the way that President Bush views the entire world — not to mention the unthinking devotion of many of our citizens to an insane alleged Commander-in-Chief whose only virtue is that it'd be fun to watch him get drunk.

Either that or chalk it up to jet lag.

By the way, the AP report did go on to mention that the Bush Administration has coughed up an additional $16 million to treat methamphetamine addiction. Why, that's more than two hours of War in Iraq we could have paid for if it weren't for those stinky meth addicts. Yup, the War on Drugs sure is important to this administration.

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Happy Birthday!

Today is the birthday of William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton and Mary Elizabeth ("Tipper") Gore, but more importantly, it's my birthday! If you believe in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then as of today I am the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

However, I am also back from my travels in Europe. I have seen €uro coins from every eurozone country except, oddly enough, Austria. I have amassed a pile of newspapers from across the Continent. I have talked politics with Europeans, American ex-pats, Americans on holiday, and even European ex-pats on holiday back in Europe. I got sunburned while tromping about the ancient (pre-World War II!!) shrines of Delos. My arrival in İstanbul was greeted with great fanfare by about two dozen musicians playing instruments I can't even name. (Some might think they were there to greet the entire ship full of tourists, but I prefer to take that one personally.) I even picked up the new Harry Potter book on its first day of release.

I have turned comments back on for this blog, since I am here to monitor for any spam or other abuses. However, since it's my birthday (and I've got wicked jet lag), I'll save the rest of my travelogue for later.

Welcome back to the Third Path, obsessively blogging for six of the last twelve weeks!

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Back on the air Real Soon Now

Hiya, everybody. It's been a while since I posted in my blog, but that's because I've been on vacation conducting field research.

Right now, I'm in Mykonos, having just visited the ancient holy site of Delos. I have loads of stuff to talk about, and loads of catching up to do, but I'll be back in less than two weeks....

Until then, please continue to enjoy the EXCITING links on the sidebar.

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The secret to world peace

I am in the city of the damned hamsters. There's just something about the image of a fire-and-brimstone hamster preacher that draws me like a moth to a flame. But yes, I am in Amsterdam, a city in which it doesn't matter who you are or what you do as long as you don't impose it on other people. You want to smoke pot or take "magic" mushrooms? Fine. Here are some regulations to keep it safe, and safely out of the hands of children. You want to have some kind of really kinky sex with a member of the same sex, or of the opposite sex, or of some other variation of sex? Fine, as long as everyone is a freely consenting adult. You want to exchange sex for specific amounts of money? Well, again, we need some health regulations and some special zoning.

The result is that the Netherlands has far fewer drug addicts per capita than countries with far stricter drug laws. The result is that the Netherlands has homosexuals and transsexuals and people whose sexuality, gender, and even biological sex defies the usual categories, in all levels of society, including the military, the courts, and elected officials, and it's just not a big deal. Any two adults can get married in the legal sense, whether or not your religion chooses to recognize it as spiritually valid. The result is that the Netherlands has far less crime — especially violent crimes — around prostitution than other countries that try to ban it entirely.

The result is a sane society that can focus its resources and attention on real problems. In other words, the result is not America.

In World War II, the Nazis occupied Amsterdam. It wasn't enough for them to occupy it militarily, it was also important for them to crush its spirit. In particular, the moral permissiveness that already characterized this city, even sixty-odd years ago, was a threat to the moral purity of the Aryan race. When Amsterdam was finally freed, they made a point of emphasizing their tolerance of "other" people as a parting gesture of defiance to the Nazis.

I don't toss in a reference to Nazis lightly, believe me. For those liberals who persist in comparing President Bush to Hitler, I say this: you are truly giving aid and comfort to America's sworn enemies — by which I mean you are giving aid and comfort to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Bush is not Hitler, and Iraq is not the Holocaust. We must never demean those horrors by invoking them for some second-rate chimpanzee and his little war.

The secret to world peace is what I did earlier tonight: I had joint-rolling lessons from two Iranians who now live in London. They took pity upon a poor klutz who couldn't roll a joint to save my life. When they left, I said to them, "I don't speak a word of Farsi, but hertzelijk dank and salaam aleichem."

Amsterdam sends greetings to a world in need of tolerance of other people.

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Dispatch from Paris

A few items from the international press for you today.

Við munum ekki leyfa ofbeldi að breyta samfélögum okkar eða gildum okkar, né munum við leyfa því að hafa áhrif á störf þessa fundar. Við munum halda áfram að ræða hvernig bæta má heiminn. Hryðjuverkamennirnir [terrorists] munu ekki hafa sitt fram. Við munum sigra, ekki þeir. — Tony Blair, forsætisráðherra Bretlands, 2005-07-07 (Morgunblaðið)

Well, yes, actually, I did throw in that quote just to put in the thorns and eths. It's the translation into Icelandic of Prime Minister Tony Blair's statement that the terrorists will not defeat Britain.

Can you guess which movie got this review? "Innrásin er girnileg sumarskemmtun. Poppkornsmynd af bestu gerð!" I must say, though, that Hagar the Horrible takes on a whole different meaning when you read it in actual Viking language.

In other news from London,

Être unis, être forts, ne pas se laisser diviser, ne pas laisser monter la haine intercommunitaire. C’est lobsession des autorités britanniques, et singulièrement celle d'un leader travailliste désormais soutenu de toutes parts, depuis l'explosion de quatre bombes jeudi dans le métro londinien et dans un bus. Hier, s'exprimant pour la première fois devant les députés de la Chambre des communes, Tony Blair a insisté: Notre pays ne seras pas vaincu par la terreur mais la vaincra et émergera de cette horreur avec nos valeurs, notre mode de vie, notre tolérance et notre respect pour les autres non diminués. — Libération 2005-07-12

(In other words, We must not let the terrorists divide our community. We will defeat the terrorists with our values, our way of life, our tolerance, and our respect for others undiminished.)

One comment from this week's Economist magazine (July 9th 2005) about the situation in London I found especially noteworthy: "George W. Bush has sometimes claimed that a silver lining to the cloud his forces are struggling through in Iraq is that at least the West's enemies are being fought there rather than at home. The attacks in London are a reminder that that view is as wrong as it is glib."

The French paper Libération also noted with horror that Ryanair (a low-cost airline based in Dublin, Ireland) is — so far unsuccessfully — pressuring its pilots to accept a contract that would require them to repay €15,000 to the company for their flight training if they either leave the company within five years or join a union. For some reason, the pilots aren't eager to sign. Said Michael O'Leary, president of Ryanair (quoted in English, even though the rest of the article is en français): "Only over my dead body and never on my fucking watch" will the pilots unionize. Wow.

A couple of tidbits from today's International Herald Tribune, truly a must for travelling in a non-English-speaking country.

Muhammad Bouyeri, a 27yo Dutch-Moroccan on trial for the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, has exercised his right to remain silent and instructed his defense attorney not to participate in the trial proceedings. Bouyeri is accused of brutally murdering van Gogh, apparently because he made a film that was critical of the treatment of women in Islamic countries. Bouyeri could receive life in prison if convicted.

Robert A. Pape has analyzed information regarding 67 of the 71 al Qaeda-linked suicide terrorists from 1995 to 2004. His conclusions are unsettling: al Qaeda is stronger since 9/11, not weaker. It has carried out more attacks and killed more people since 9/11 than before. Almost all of its suicide bombers have come from Islamic countries in which the United States has a significant military presence, not from other countries listed by the State Department as "state sponsors of terrorism" (Iran, Libya, Sudan, or Iraq).

Afghanistan produced al Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the American-led invasion of the country in 2001. The clear implication is that if al Qaeda was [sic] no longer able to draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is a heavy American combat presence, it might well collapse. — Robert A. Pape, International Herald Tribune, 2005-07-12

Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Jihad: the Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, gives striking insight into Osama bin Laden's apparent ability to hide in Pakistan: it is not in Pakistan's interest to find him, because if it does, its domestic problems will multiply while the U.S. will no longer consider it quite as vital to our strategic interests.

One of the letters to the editor especially caught my eye:

It's dangerous to assume that more than a billion of the world's Muslims are a monolithic bloc. Terrorists come from countries and regions where Shariah law [a draconian set of Islamic legal traditions] is prevalent. Youth raised under Shariah inevitably feel enmity when faced with the modern way of life and values; some of them react violently. Islam is a religion that promotes compassion and justice. It is the archaic set of values associated with Islam that creates this terrible problem we are facing. — Ahmet Ozgunes, Istanbul

Back on the home front, Nicholas Kristof writes of the insanity of the Bush administration's position against Oregon's "death with dignity" statute, and the main editorial makes the point that it is time for the Defense Department to address the real enemies we face, instead of the enemies that would justify the weapon systems we would like to build. "After four years of painful surprises, the Pentagon should recognize that chasing indiscriminately after remote contingencies can leave U.S. forces dangerously underequipped and understaffed for real wars."

Lastly, here in Paris (both where I'm staying and where the IHT is headquartered), John Vinocur details the ways in which the political leadership in France is dangerously out of touch with both domestic and international realities. The people have resoundingly said "non" to the draft European constitution, but the leaders across the spectrum continue undaunted to press for France to lead the drive for Eunity. France is also falling out of a leadership role on the world stage, in part because of their lack of involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, their lack of attention to African poverty and famine, and their bizarre relationship to American power, following our lead in Lebanon but insisting that they can lead Europe to provide a much-needed counterbalance to American unilateralism (never mind what the rest of Europe thinks). Evidently the problem of arrogant and/or insane political leaders isn't limited to America.

For those of you sitting in America, please please please seek out sources of news beyond the American corporate media conglomerates. There are fine, responsible journalists working for PBS, NPR, Comedy Central, CNN, ABNBCBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post (though much less often the New York Post or the Washington Times), and others, but in a world of global problems we need to at least take a look at the viewpoints of the other 5½ continents.

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Is bisexuality real?

The New York Times, which usually tries to offer journalistic integrity to the world, slipped up the other day. On July 5th, they published an article about a study that suggests that there is no such thing as "true" bisexuality, at least among men. The fact that the researcher has conducted eugenics research apparently wasn't deemed relevant.

I once identified as bisexual, but for me it was merely a stepping stone on the path to coming all the way out as gay. I know a number of other people for whom the same is true. However, I also know a number of people for whom the same is not true. Indeed, I know several people who came out as gay or lesbian, lived openly as gay or lesbian for decades, but finally found they could no longer deny that they also feel attraction to some members of the "opposite" sex. (Never mind my friends who don't subscribe to the silly, limited notion that there are only two sexes or genders.)

No matter how hard you try to pigeonhole people, one inescapable fact remains: People are not pigeons.

Thanks to FAIR for the heads-up to the action alert on the GLAAD web site.

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Terror Strikes

Terrorists staged multiple strikes against London's public transit systems this morning, including at Edgware Road, my old tube station. Several hundred people were injured, including dozens killed. A group claiming affiliation to al Qaeda has claimed blame for the attacks.

The Bush administration would have us believe that by fighting the terrorists "over there" (in Iraq), we are somehow safer "over here" (in America and our allies in the so-called "war on terror").

It seems to me that al Qaeda is quite capable of multi-tasking.

We are LESS SAFE because of the war in Iraq. We are training MORE terrorists, and giving them plenty of practice at killing Americans and our allies, so they can do it more efficiently when they come strike us at home.

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Temporary Comment Restriction

Sorry, but I can't leave my blog open to whatever comments happen to land here when I'm gone this long. Thus, until I get back, this blog will temporarily hide all comments. You can e-mail me at ßLøgspõtҨLiΝ¢Måd•cöm [Any spam to that address will be vigorously LARTed.] if you have technical suggestions for a less intrusive way than requiring Blogger registration to protect against blogspam.

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God bless those other countries, too

Your trusty blogger is about to embark on some field research on international relations. I'll be investigating Bastille Day in Paris (my second!), exploring a city in which it is possible to enjoy herbal entertainment (or even fungal sacraments) without fear of interference by Dutch-speaking people with handcuffs, frolicking with European radical faeries (on Terskhhhhhhhhelling Island), comparing wedding chapels in Barcelona (just in case I meet Mr. Right some time soon), and sailing across the Mediterranean with an entire shipload of ho-mo-se-xu-als (because I've never been to Spain, Italy, or Turkey, and I'm not going to fly to Asia for the first time, I'm going to take a BUS!).

That means that I shall be blogging much less frequently for most of the rest of the summer. I shall have longish periods with no possibility of Internet access, and other days where it will just be outrageously expensive. (I mean, I'm obsessive about my blog and all, but I'm not going to pay to jack in via satellite from a cruise ship. Maybe we'll have lunch in an Internet café in Florence or something.)

I will thus leave you with links to a few of my favorite of my postings, and other good stuff. If you spam my blog, I will stir-fry your ballbags and serve them to prisoners at Gizmo, with lamb and hummus. [It's a Daily Show reference.]

• Fareed v. Fwill on Snuffaluffagus — Fareed Zakaria gives me hope for America, no exaggeration
• Alternative Text of the Federal Marriage Amendment, or the plain-English summary
• review of What the Bleep — a cult indoctrination film that actually talks some sense!
• Why I opposed Robert Börk when President Satan Nixon Reagan appointed him to be Swedish Chef Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (Or "Ayyyy-jay-ess-see, baby!") — it wasn't his facial hair! [and also the few articles following that one]
  
• A translation of President George "Dumbya" Bush's address at Fort Bragg into plain English
• A Modest Proposal for peace in the Middle East, followed up by a more serious proposal.
• my second week, including George Galloway before the Senate
• Why the Catholic church inevitably produces pedophile priests
• America, the (Phrase) Book — useful phrases like the Finnish for "Do you speak French?" and a deeply offensive insult in Hawai'ian. (I don't know how to spell it, but if you meet someone from Denmark, be sure to call them a "blaue-huul" [in German phonetics].)
  
• Two of my more conservative postings
• My schoolyard insult to Governor Schwulearzeneggficker
• Oh my goddess, it's not a joke ad on Comedy Central, it's a real product!
  
• (irony-mode=OFF) My tribute to the enduring symbol of our Freedom, the Flag of the United States of America
• Open criticism of a die-hard leftie, Mayor Willie Brown
• My analysis of the parallels between the Michael Jackson trial and the two O.J. Simpson trials.
• Any of the links on the lefthand sidebar, including the archives and the other blogs and generally worthwhile places to visit, certainly including KQKE and Air America. As for Randi Rhodes, there's not a straight bone in my body, but her show makes me want to give her a [virtual] big ol' kiss on the mouth. Here's some e-hugs instead. If given a choice between The Daily Show and oxygen, take the Daily Show. You're allowed to have oxygen if it's a re-run.
  

Thanks to Ann C., whose nifty new bumpersticker gave me my headline!

P.S. Sure sign of the impending apocalypse: Diet Pepsi using a Ramones song in their TV commercial. It's the most sick-and-wrong musical mix I've heard since the muzak version of the theme song from M∗A∗S∗H — you know, "Suicide is Painless [la la la] It brings on many changes [deet deet dee deet deet dee] ..." But now we have Jon Stewart telling us (yes, in a re-run, but hey, I'm an addict) about John Hostettler (R–Indiana) and the War on Christianity. Watch the episode of Stella on Comedy Central where one of the guys runs for President of the residents board for their apartment building, with an eye to the many layers of political satire; it's more rich than I have time to write about if I'm going to catch my plane in two days.... That and all of Reno 911! Seriously. And go see Lords of Dogtown and Summer Storm; if you like this blog, you will not regret it.

Something to think about: I think Morgan Spurlock is a more interesting person than "Jared," but I'd way rather eat nothing but Subway than nothing but McDonald's. (Wow, Morgan Spurlock rigged the conditions so that he would have to balloon in a month: he had to eat three meals a day, all of them at Mickey D'ease, he had to eat every single menu item at least once, and he wasn't allowed to eat anything not on the McD'oh menu. And your point is? He ate McD intensely for a month to show how nutritionally unbalanced it is, and he deliberately limited his physical activity to the level of the average American, and, no great surprise, the result of eating lots of high-saturated-fat, high-calorie, high-salt, high in high-fructose corn syrup — much worse for you than cane sugar — food and getting almost no exercise, is that you will gain weight.) [As Subway points out, Jared's specific diet may not be right for anyone else, and exercise should always be included in any weight-loss plan, but Subway does make quality food that can be an important part of a healthy lifestyle (along with Lean Cuisine and Fresca, the only diet soda I can tolerate), as opposed to a very infrequent guilty pleasure.]

I'll be back to incessant posting for about a week and a half in August, then off to Burning Man, and then I'll be back with a vengeance after Labor Day, at least until it's time for the Northwest Naraya on Vashon Island. Have a well-informed summer!

Historical trivia: what event of global importance occurred at 11 minutes past the 11th hour?

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Is Senator Orrin Hatch illiterate?

Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Joe Biden (D-Delaware) faced off on Face the Nation this Sunday, discussing the upcoming nomination of a Supreme Court Associate Justice to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.

Hatch said:

Let's understand something: the Constitution does not require consultation [of the Senate by the President in selecting a Supreme Court nominee], it's a courtesy. — Senator Orrin Hatch on Face the Nation, July 3, 2005

Well, Senator Hatch, far be it for me to lecture you on Constitutional law, but I believe the phrase is "with the advice and consent of the Senate." What part of "advice and consent" is not clear to you? "Advice and consent" does not mean the same thing as "rubber stamp," nor does it simply mean an up-or-down vote. It means exactly what it says: it is the Constitutional responsibility of the Senate to advise the President on nominees, and it is the Constitutional responsibility of the President to seek that advice — and not just from the majority party, either.

When President Clinton came to Orrin Hatch in 1993 to ask his opinion regarding a nominee (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to replace Byron White, and the following year, when he consulted with Hatch before nominating Stephen Breyer to replace Harry Blackmun, the Democrats held the majority in the Senate, with one more seat than the Republicans hold today. If the Democrats played by President Bush's playbook, they could have rammed through two wild-eyed liberal activists who would've outlawed straight white men over 40 (whew! I'm only 3 out of 4!), but instead he chose to get the advice and consent of the Senate, including the minority party.

That is precisely what the American people — and our Constitution — demand of a President.

I posted a challenge to President Bush's judicial nominees, back when we were only talking about appellate courts. In a nutshell, prove that you will listen and consider both sides of a complex issue, not prejudging it or dismissing one side as coming from another planet. As for the so-called "Constitutional option" of eliminating filibusters on judicial nominations, violating the rules of the Senate by ramming through a rules change by brute force without the 2/3 majority vote such a change requires, hardly qualifies as a "Constitutional option" in my judgment. If the Republicans want to change the rules of the Senate, let them do it by the established procedure, not by having President Cheney [Dick Cheney is Vice President of the United States, but also President of the Senate] make a transparently false ruling from the chair.

The filibuster has been a part of the Senate since its first session. As for Supreme Court nominees being rejected by the Senate, the first President to suffer that indignity was President George "Dubya" Washington when he nominated John Rutledge as Chief Justice in 1795.

The Republicans need to get over their persecution complex — especially since 7 of the 9 Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican Presidents — and send a nominee who will treat all parties to a case with respect, and ameliorate [make better] rather than exacerbate [make worse] the political divide in our nation and in our Supreme Court.

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Sometimes it's the little things

I went over to the East Bay this evening for a quiet little barbecue with a few friends, going out on the back porch to watch the fireworks over the Richmond Marina. But then I had to get back to San Francisco, which means driving across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Even though I only drive on the bridge occasionally, I got myself a "FasTrack" electronic toll gizmo last year so that I don't have to wait in line and then fish for three bucks; I just zoom right through in the dedicated FasTrack-only lane.

Trouble is, most of the people trying to get to San Francisco tonight don't have FasTrack, and most of the toll booths were unstaffed on a Sunday night of a holiday weekend. The net result was that I had to wait and wait and wait, slowly crawling forward behind masses of cars waiting to pay their cash to the few humans in the toll plaza, before finally getting to zoom the last 200 feet to the toll plaza.

I couldn't help thinking, there has to be a better way to let those of us who have the labor-saving device get more advantage from it. One possibility would be to open more FasTrack-only lanes when most of the booths are unstaffed. Another possibility would be to extend the markings of the special lanes back farther from the toll plaza, because I couldn't tell until I was almost upon it where the special lane began. (The other thing that often snarls traffic is that it's almost impossible to tell which lanes are open or closed, because the lanes curve so much.)

Once I got onto the bridge, traffic moved freely, even with a breakdown in the right lane just before mid-span, so the delay was absolutely 100% waiting for people to pay cash to a human toll-taker.

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The Two Wars of the Worlds

Frank Rich in today's New York Times (link above) writes about the difficulty that President Bush is having in trying to frighten America into "staying the course" with his agenda, both in Iraq and at home.

Just one quick pull quote:

The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf. That's why a film director [Spielberg] engaging in utter fantasy can arouse more anxiety about a possible attack on America than our actual commander in chief hitting us with the supposed truth. — Frank Rich, New York Times, July 3, 2005

Tom Cruise certainly is a nutbag adherent of a bizarre religious cult that was literally pulled out of the ass of a second-rate science-fiction writer — but he's still a good actor. Go see War of the Worlds, but also check out Frank Rich in today's NYTimes.

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A compliment from Ahmadinejad

CNN has a story "Ex-Iranian Agent: Photo Not Ahmadinejad" on its web site today (byline: Ali Akbar Dareini).

Some of the hostages taken at the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 have stated that they believe that President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the Iranians who held them captive for over a year. Ahmadinejad has denied the claim.

Exiled former President Abholhassan Bani-Sadr claims that Ahmadinejad was involved after the initial capture of the Embassy, but that he was not one of the "decision-makers." Ahmadinejad initially opposed the hostage-taking, but changed his mind when Ayatollah Khomeini gave his approval.

Former secret agent Saeed Hajjarian attributed a compliment to the United States to Mr. Ahmadinejad:

Ahmadinejad believed that the great Satan [was] the Soviet Union and that America was the smaller Satan. — Saeed Hajjarian, July 2005

Well, it's a good thing that George W. Bush is out there to defend our Texan American pride by making us once again the #1 Satan in the world. Yee-ha! Them Soviets never could compete with good ol' Yankee Amurrican know-how.

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Something odd about Manson

There's something odd about Manson, Iowa. Manson has a secret. For years, geologists knew that something was odd about the land around here. Abnormalities had been uncovered as far back as 1912, but the scientific community believed that ancient volcanic activity was the culprit. But then geologists Ray Anderson and Brian Witzke changed everything: they found shocked quartz. Only one thing on earth is powerful enough to create shocked quartz: a nuclear weapon. The conclusion was clear: 75 million years ago, our pre-mammalian ancestors in Iowa had WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!

I'm just watching the National Geographic Channel's NAKED Science show about killer asteroids. Yes, once every few million years, an asteroid hits the earth with such force that it would extinguish the entire human race. In fact, we are four times more likely to be struck by an asteroid than hit by lightning. [according to NatGeo, anyway]

But what does that mean?

How many people have you ever heard of who were killed by a massive asteroid that wiped out the entire human species? How many people have you ever heard of who were struck by lightning? Maybe a few dozen, up to possibly a few hundred, people are killed by lightning every year in the United States, not counting the ones who survive. At least half a dozen people die from lightning strikes every year, just in the city of Singapore — more than in all of Great Britain!

Now, I'm sure that if you average out the number of people killed per year over a hundred million years or so, the asteroid will probably beat the lightning by a handy margin. However, most humans are just a tiny bit more selfish than that perspective reflects. What are the odds that I will be struck by lightning, ever in my lifetime? What are the odds that I will be vaporized by a meteor, ever in my lifetime? Should I climb a tall tree in a thunderstorm? Should I carry a concealed semi-automatic handgun just in case I need to shoot down a rogue meteor the size of Mount Everest?

This program really is the science geek's answer to Cops. "Bad science, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you-u-u-u?" Shoulda known with a name like NAKED Science.

Let me put on my Donald Rumsfeld hat and answer a few of my own questions:

• Should we worry about an asteroid collision in our daily lives? No. Not even a tiny little bit.
  
• Should we spend taxpayer money to look for asteroids that might destroy the earth? Hell, yes. A few months' advance warning really might mean the difference between a cataclysm and a pretty fireworks display. Forewarned is forearmed, dontcha know.
  
• Should we worry more about our cellphones giving us brain cancer? No, that one is somewhere around "being eaten by mutant zombies" in the grand scheme of risks to life and limb. It could happen, sure, but let's be serious.
  
• Should we carry gas masks around with us on the subway, just in case of an anthrax or Sarin gas attack? Ya know, you can just go right ahead and tap dance naked on my grave if that one bites you on the ass. Oh, except that you'll be dead, of course. Maybe you could haunt me. On the other hand, maybe that's why both of my computers crash so often. Woo-oo-oo-oo! My Dogbert doll commands you to hie thee hence!
• Should we seriously think about the damage that human technology is doing to the earth and the life upon it? Well, that might be a good idea, but only if we're more interested in the survival of the species than in fake photos of Britney Spears getting it on with Paris Hilton. (Or are they really fake??) I'm not talking just about global warming here, folks. We are killing off whole species, even whole phyla, of plants and animals, faster than anything since that, umm, killer asteroid 65 million years ago. You know, the one that created the Gulf of Mexico and killed the dinosaurs. So yeah, if we have a spare moment, we might want to think about not raping the earth, at least not quite so roughly, 'cause she might just fight back one of these days.
  

Gosh, I wonder why the general public doesn't understand and/or doesn't trust the pronouncements by scientists about risks.

It would be unfair to compare the science shown on this program with the Bush administration's so-called reasoning behind its policies, but there are certain parallels. Both are engaged in sensationalistic fear-mongering. It's the dramatic music that sells the TV show about KILLER ASTEROIDS!!! but it's about as scientific as that useless little plastic/foil sticker that's supposed to reduce the HARMFUL RADIATION from your cellphone into your braaaaaain (or improve your reception in elevators, or maybe both). Likewise, the Bush administration's presentation of its "evidence" on Iraq really wasn't far removed from "We've got charts and graphs, so fuck off!" and the President's Social Security plan is clearly a faith-based initiative.

Be alert. The world needs more lerts. Well, the world could use a few more people who understand at least enough science to know when someone is spouting total bullshit. The world could also use a few more people who give a damn about the yawning chasm between what the government says and the reality of the situation, whether we're talking Iraq or Social Security, and even whether we're talking Republicans or Democrats.

We should also question our government when it tells us for 68 years that marijuana is an addictive drug that will ruin our lives and destroy our society. Sure, marijuana is addictive. It's almost as addictive as Robitussin. Now, take your crack cocaine or your crystal meth or your alcohol, heroin, or tobacco — those are your big-league addictive substances. On the other hand, we have prisons bursting at the seams, the feds even stepping in to place the California state prison system in receivership this week, because, among many other reasons, we have thousands and thousands of people in prison for simple possession of marijuana. We know from his own direct admission that President George W. Bush has smoked marijuana, so I'll grant you that it can cause insanity and inability to cope coherently with adult reality, but for most people the effects are rather less severe. How can we trust a government that has so consistently, under both parties, outright lied to us about its drug policies through TWELVE administrations?

But since I mentioned Manson, here's a link for you: Ike, Tay, and Zac Manson. Or something that rhymes with it, anyway.

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Another Sunday, Another Opportunity to End the Bush Nightmare

I was just watching Meet the Press and This Week with George Snuffaluffagus (sp?) from almost three weeks ago, ever glad that I have not one but TWO TiVo-like devices. (The shows are on opposite each other at what I consider an unsociable hour on a Sunday morning.)

On Meet the Press, we see Hillary Clinton at a fund-raiser saying:

There has never been an administration, I don't believe, in our history more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda. I know it's frustrating for many of you. It's frustrating for me. Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them? ... I can tell you this: It's very hard to tell people they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth. — Senator Hillary Clinton at a "Women for Hillary" gathering, June 6, 2005

and it went on from there! If you want to see a "fair and balanced" analysis of her comments, try this blog: http://www.blogsagainsthillary.com/archives/2005/06/sen_clinton_say.html
— unless you think that "Blogs Against Hillary" is part of the left-wing biased media.

On This Week, we saw the wonderful Robert Reich face off against George Fwill, but even better, we saw North Carolina Republican Walter B. Jones, Jr. — the very same who coined the term "Freedom Fries" for the Congressional cafeteria — speaking out against the waste of lives caused by the wretched mismanagement of the war in Iraq. Jones' web site features a useful response to the Terri Schiavo case (encouraging people to discuss end-of-life issues with their loved ones and draft a living will) and a counter of the federal debt, now at $7.8 trillion dollars, or over $26,000 per person — well more than double what it was when George W. Bush took office in 2001. George W. Bush has presided over more deficit spending than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

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What the { } // null set Do We Know?

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A few weeks ago, I had occasion to watch the movie "Wħ∀⊕ _ †h℮ _ βL∈∋P _ ∂∅ _ ℑ _ Ḱñθω!?" for the third time. I suppose this is a good opportunity for me to tell you both a bit about the movie (its strengths and also its shortcomings) and about my own background.

What tHe βlεεp Dθ wΣ kπow!?™ (What the [bleep] do we know!?) is an independent film exploring the interplay between philosophy and science, especially quantum mechanics. In doing so, it ventures into the most fundamental questions of existence, such as the balance between determinism (the universe is a mechanism, whose precise workings could be predicted in every detail if we only had all the necessary measurements), randomness (there is an element of absolute randomness or arbitrariness at some level of the moment-to-moment existence of the universe), and intelligence and free will (it is possible to choose an action which changes the unfolding pattern of the universe).

I have a fairly unusual background for watching the film: I studied quantum mechanics, and my professor, Dr. Val Fitch, was a Nobel laureate. I've long since lost the fine details, but I remember quantum enough to be able to spot some shortcomings in the movie's explanations, and even give you my answer to Albert Einstein's key complaint about quantum mechanics.

There's a scene in the film that offers a fairly good metaphor for quantum-level reality. Marlee Matlin finds herself cajoled into playing a game of basketball with a boy. The boy explains that in parallel quantum realities, the ball could be anywhere on the court; it is the act of observing the ball that fixes it to only one of those possibilities. It's an allusion to the underpinnings of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

What Heisenberg said is that there is a limit to the precision with which you can specify both the position and the energy of a particle. The more precisely you know where the particle is, the less precisely you know its energy, and vice-versa. The usual illustration is a billiard ball bouncing around on a pool table in a completely dark room with funky acoustics. In order to find out something about the ball, you shoot the cue ball at it. The harder you slam the cue ball, the more exactly you can tell where the balls collided, because you hear the "crack." However, you then send the ball careening off at high velocity, with very little knowledge of how fast the ball was going before the cue struck it. On the flip side, if you hit the cue ball gently, you can tell much more about how fast the first ball was moving, but you have much less idea where the collision took place. (The analogy is far from perfect, of course.)

Returning to the basketball court analogy from What the Bleep, think of the whole court as an infinite set of possibilities of basketball-ness. However, in the act of observing the basketball, you do not in fact collapse that infinite set to a single truth. Rather, you collapse it to a smaller infinity.

When I was a college freshman, my roommate, also a math-science nerd, was trying to explain to me the concept of different "sizes" of infinity; my mind utterly rebelled at the idea. Infinite is infinite, ∞ = ∞, right? Well, actually, no. Look up "aleph null" (א₀) and read about the sizes of infinity. However, that's not the kind of "smaller infinity" I'm talking about.

What the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us is that the basketball is a better metaphor than it might seem. The act of observing the situation doesn't collapse the infinite range of possibilities to a single point, but rather collapses it to a narrower infinite range.

The unfolding of the existence of the universe from one moment to the next, results from a finite number of infinite ranges of possibility. Each proton, electron, and neutrino in the universe (whether it's part of your body, the earth, or your Winnebago), has a quantum probability field in which it has an infinitesimal chance of winding up in a dark alleyway in Cleveland. The range of possibilities is always infinite for each particle, because it could be over here or over here or over (wait for it...) here, on top of which it might have this much energy or This much energy or THIS much energy, or pi times that much. However, there are only so many particles. (Did you know that it is fundamentally impossible to write out a googolplex in numbers, because there aren't even that many protons in the entire universe? Yes, really. It would take more than a billion billion universes.)

Each particle has an infinite range of possible choices, but the number of choices to be made is not infinite. If particle A is within a certain range of possibilities, and particle B is in a corresponding range, then they are likely to interact. If all the choices are completely random, then statistically the random variations will mostly cancel out over a large enough sampling. If you roll a thousand dice, the odds are very good that your total will be pretty close to 3,500, even though there are some sixes and some ones mixed in. On a small scale, each die is random — it is equally likely that an individual roll will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 — but in large numbers the dice will average out very close to 3½. (There's about a 90% chance that the sum of 1,000 dice will be between 3,400 and 3,600.)

If we take a large object like a planet or a star or a whole galaxy, any random variations on the part of the individual particles are completely lost. We can calculate that the sun will be completely eclipsed by the moon for 2 minutes and 27 seconds on August 1, 2008, because at that scale the behavior of celestial bodies is a perfect clockwork. Better yet, on July 16, 2186, there will be a total solar eclipse lasting 7 minutes and 29 seconds! (Eclipse predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA/Goddard SFC)

But, hey, hang on a minute here, bucko. Not only can we tell when a solar eclipse will happen 181 years in the future, we know to the second how long it will last. Doesn't that mean that the entire universe is nothing but a clockwork, a vast system of cogs and gears in rigid pre-ordained relationships? Maybe.

Let's go back down to the sub-sub-sub-atomic level for a moment. Exactly where is that proton? Where will it be, and what will its energy state be, a nanosecond from now? The only thing we can give you is a set of probability equations. If we blast an anti-proton into our observation chamber, we can see what interactions take place, but it's still a probability field.

Einstein had great difficulty accepting the idea of quantum mechanics, objecting that "God does not play dice." Well, Albert, what if the dice themselves are God? Or how about this: what if the very existence of intelligence — the capacity to bias the rolls of a group of dice in a particular direction — is God? It is a fact that we cannot reduce the behavior of subatomic particles beyond a probability field. It is a fact that on the scale of stars and galaxies the behavior of the universe is predictable to unimaginable precision. It is a fact that the choices that intelligent beings make can affect the arrangement of at least some of the nearby "dice" for the next few rolls. Quantum mechanics neither proves nor disproves, nor even gives evidence for or against, the existence of God.

While I'm here, I may as well also demolish the so-called "Intelligent Design" theory hypothesis. The proponents of Intelligent Design maintain that there are certain structures in the physical universe that are so complex they could only have been designed by some intelligent force. Utter nonsense. Either there was an "intelligent designer" or there wasn't; all we know is that certain complex structures do exist. In order to posit the existence of an intelligent designer, we would have to know what a universe would look like with one and what it would look like without one. Since we only have the one universe, we can neither prove nor disprove "Intelligent Design." It is an intrinsically unscientific hypothesis, because it can never be tested.

We see the great warrior priest of the minus three hundred thirtieth century, Ramtha, channelling through some certifiable nutbag named J. Z. Knight. Don't be distracted by Knight's large breasts; she's utterly nuts. However, some of what she says is still true. (After following a lunatic at a public hearing once, I told the board, "Just because a crazy person says it's raining, doesn't mean you don't need an umbrella.") I certainly fault the film, though, for not telling us up front that the words we were hearing out of this woman's mouth came supposedly from someone whose body died 35,000 years ago. "The only way that I will ever be great to myself is not what I do to my body, but what I do to my mind."

We also meet Dr. Joe Dispenza, but, unless you look very carefully at the closing credits, you probably won't notice that he's really a chiropractor. I have nothing against chiropractic or chiropractors; I see one several times a year to keep my spine happy. However, Dr. Dispenza is way out of his league talking about "infecting the quantum field" each day when he wakes up, looking for some completely unexpected event that will confirm to him that he really did create his own reality. It's pretty difficult to go through an entire day without an unexpected event of some description. Also, how exactly does one "infect the quantum field"? Just by thinking about it? It's not that easy. It is by our concrete actions that we affect the quantum fields of the particles that comprise us and that surround us. Thought itself is an action, of course, but Dr. Dispenza imbues it with mystical significance that shows him to be a silly little wanker.

Another segment of What the Bleep focuses on the extent to which human reactions are determined by hormones. Taking testosterone, whether to build professional athelete muscles or to give a female-to-male transsexual a body more in line with his identity, can cause an increase in aggressive behavior. When some circumstance triggers a panic reaction, it becomes quite difficult to think rationally, because adrenaline pushes the fight-or-flight response. When we have a sexual response to someone we see (or something we see, hear, or smell), we are easily distracted.

Again, reality doesn't fit neatly into either extreme. We are neither automatons responding mindlessly to the injection of hormones and other biochemicals, nor perfectly logical beings who react only with our intellect. The reality is, if you will, along the Third Path.

The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but be in the mystery. Ponder that for a while. — Fred Alan Wolf, PhD, in What the Bleep Do We Know?

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Why I opposed Robert Bork

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement, setting the stage for the first Supreme Court nomination in 11 years. I think this is an excellent time, then, to reflect on a previous nomination that bitterly divided the nation: President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Bork was eventually rejected by the Senate, after a fight that got quite ugly on all sides. Neither Democrats nor Republicans comported themselves well.

The greatest focus of opposition to Bob Bork was the fear that he would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade and roll back some of the civil rights decisions of the post-World War II era. However, those issues were not the center of my personal opposition to his nomination.

First and foremost, as Solicitor General of the United States during the Watergate era, Bork failed a crucial test of character. Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox was pressing the White House to turn over the tapes that Nixon had made of nearly every conversation in the Oval Office. Nixon's response was to get rid of Cox, so he ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson resigned because he refused to comply. Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also resigned rather than comply with such an egregious miscarriage of justice. However, Robert Bork, the third in line, said, "Sure, why not?" Those tapes eventually brought down Richard Nixon, and the special prosecutor law was clarified so that the subject of an investigation could not fire the investigator, but Bork was forever tainted by his betrayal of the concept of justice.

Second, Bork has written extensively about his concept of the theory of law, especially constitutional law, and his writings are frightening. For just one outrageous example, Bork, who claims to be a "strict constructionist," asserts the twisted notion that somehow "freedom of speech" only refers to "freedom of explicitly political speech":

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. — First Amendment

Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary, or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic. Moreover, within that category of speech we ordinarily call political, there should be no constitutional obstruction to laws making criminal any speech that advocates forcible overthrow of the government or the violation of any law. — Robert Bork, Indiana Law Journal, 1971

To say that you are a "strict constructionist" and then insert a word not written by the authors of the Constitution, radically changing its scope and meaning, is an outright contradiction.

In short, I opposed Robert Bork's nomination less because of the decisions I feared he would make, and more because of how I feared he would make them. That the man is a respected legal scholar is mystifying, given his bizarre and unique theories.

If you want to read more about Bork, I recommend Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

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Finding myself with strange (judicial) bedfellows

The Supreme Court was absolutely nuts to say that the power of eminent domain can be used when the "public use" involved is nothing more than increasing the size of your tax base. It's offensive to the concept of property rights, and I find myself agreeing with, of all people, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Justice Clarence Thomas (plus Justice Sandra Day O'Connor — rather less of a surprise) in their dissent.

The concept of eminent domain is that it is sometimes necessary for the government to seize land in order to put it to public use — building a school, firehouse, police station, or other public building, or perhaps building a road or an airport. An office complex is not a "public use" within the context of the constitutional provision for eminent domain, except that five Justices say that it is.

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