Ajiva

Weeding

2012-01-11T09:33:00.001-06:00

After the months of pre-Iowa caucus campaigning and posturing and debates, the results from Iowa and from New Hampshire show a trend: weeding out the extremists. Good to see.

Slayerfest 2011

2011-04-02T10:41:00.004-05:00

Back in 1992 my friend David and I went to see a campy movie called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The title was a hoot and it had Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer, in addition to Kristy Swanson (I'd never heard of her) and that guy from "90210." It was funny and light-hearted and made me laugh at times. Paul Rubens's death scene was hilarious.

Flash forward five years and "Buffy" was suddenly a TV series. Having liked the movie I tuned into the first episode. The tone was very different, much darker and not played for laughs, and while the show was quite uneven I made a point of watching it. I liked the characterizations and the interactions between them. My wife thought I was kind of nuts for watching a show with such a stupid name. I think she watched a couple minutes here and there. The first season was OK, but then the second and third seasons were some of the best TV I had seen and "Buffy" was now must-see TV for me. My wife got hooked into the second season, too, and from there we had a standing date to watch the show. We also got into "Angel."

Seven years later the show wrapped up, leaving a void on Tuesday nights that still hasn't been filled. The DVDs came out, we bought them. And every winter starting around Thanksgiving we watch the entire series from beginning to end. We call it "Slayerfest" in honor of Mr. Trick (one of the Buffyverse's best short-run characters, exuberantly played by K. Todd Freeman, from the episode "Homecoming" S3.5) It takes several months to get through 145 episodes, given the time constraints a quasi-adult life imposes on us, but get through it we do. Last night we finished the series for the fifth or sixth time.

Every year we see, hear or just figure out stuff that we hadn't noticed before. The show is extremely layered and with repeated watchings we peel back more of those layers. Amazing stuff and you can find much serious discussion of those things elsewhere. The contrast between the TV show and the movie is stark. It appears that the director and producer of the movie simply did not understand what was going on in the story, revised it heavily and removed almost everything of substance in favor of producing a teen romp. (Something much closer to the original version came out in comic book form a few years ago- it's worth getting the first Buffy Omnibus to read it).

Not only are we fans of "Buffy" but also "Angel," "Firefly" and "Dollhouse." Between all those shows on DVD, we really don't have to watch most of the pablum and crap that is pumped out by the networks these days. (Un)reality TV holds no interest for me and it seems like most of the TV programing these days is devoted to this form of schlockistry. We watch "Fringe" and "Bones" but not much else other than public TV (which will be going away if the Republicans have their way, all that inconvenient investigative journalism being a problem for them. Can't have Americans knowing the truth, after all). There seems to be little place for intelligent, well-written and well-acted television these days.

Grand Jury Convened

2011-02-18T14:41:00.002-06:00

To follow up on the post from January 16 about the investigative journalism into the horrific murder of Frank Morris (having said that, are there any non-horrific murders?)a grand jury has begun hearing testimony about the murder.

This is one of the essential reasons for a free press in a democracy. As we have seen in Egypt recently, freedom of the press is central to freedom. Freedom requires access to the truth. Politics, on the other hand, tends to prefer that the people only have access to the truth which is helpful to the politician. Over the past few decades, the troubling pattern of faux journalism with overt political agendas has become increasingly mainstream. Another interference with access to the truth has arisen, with some members of Congress pushing to eliminated funding of public broadcasting. The cover story for this is trimming the budget, but the real reason is the perception by the right wing that public broadcasting results in support for liberalism. They aren't wrong, of course, because reality is infamous for its liberal bias. The irony, of course, is that public broadcasting provides some of the most conservative real journalism available in America...

The beginning of the end of the American experiment

2011-01-26T21:40:00.002-06:00

The fundamental necessity of democracy is that it represents all of the people, at least to a reasonable degree. In the US we do this through the structure of a republic.

As the idiot wing (sorry, not a very "ajiva" attitude) takes control of the Republican Party and the Republican Party seizes control of US policy, we can now see the clear beginnings of the death spiral of our nation:

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to eliminate the federal public financing system that helps pay for presidential campaigns and political conventions.

Goodbye America. We hardly knew ye.

Why newspapers are essential

2011-01-16T12:36:00.002-06:00

Newspapers are collapsing around the US, in part due to competition from other news media outlets (TV and the Internet, primarily). There is, however, a qualitative difference between TV and Internet journalism and newspapers. TV and the Internet operate on a very short news cycle (minutes to hours) and real investigative journalism is now very scarce in these media.

Newspapers offer a longer news cycle and as such can do serious investigative journalism. Consider the Concordia Sentinel's four year investigation into the horrific murder of Frank Morris, a black shoe store owner who was burned in the 1964 torching of his business by members of the Ku Klux Clan. It is impossible to imagine a TV reporter being allowed four years to investigate a story.

Read the article and consider the depth of this piece of investigative journalism. Journalists are tasked with uncovering and publishing the truth of events in our world. Doing so often requires extraordinary persistence and patience. The disappearance of true in-depth investigative reporting- which is primarily done by newspapers, and which are now an endangered species- threatens our society's ability to know what is really happening in our communities and the broader world. Imagine for a moment Watergate in the world of Fox News and if Deep Throat had called Bill O'Reilly. You'd have never heard of those events and Richard Nixon would have served out his term instead of resigning in well-earned disgrace.

Liberty depends on knowledge of the truth. If we lose high quality investigative journalism, we lose part of our freedom with it.

Learn about Frank Morris and remember him. The investigative journalism of one dedicated reporter may bring his murderer(s) to justice- something the FBI had been unable to do. MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and the Huffington Post wouldn't have done it- it would have taken too long from their perspective.

Fionn MacCumhaill, 2006?-11/19/2010

2010-11-19T02:52:00.009-06:00

Our big guy, Fionn, was adopted from the St. Paul Humane Society in September 2007, about a month after the death of our beloved Derdriu (who died about the time the I-35W bridge collapsed). He was estimated to be about a year old and was in his second shelter after not being adopted for an extended period. Fionn was a big orange moof of a cat, sometimes a pain and sometimes a joy. He was an incredibly entertaining sleeper, adopting all manner of humorous poses. The top photo is a few days after he came to live with us (he had just yawned when my wife snapped the photo); the second photo is a pretty typical nap position; the third photo is from a few months ago when I caught him snoozing on the couch with his buddies the pillows (especially the white fuzzy one, he just loved that pillow in particular); and the bottom photo was the same day as the first.

On Sunday morning Fionn developed symptoms of a urinary obstruction. I took him to the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital where he was assessed, unobstructed with a catheter and kept there two nights. He seemed to be doing well and I brought him home on Tuesday. A few hours later he showed the same symptoms and I took him back to the hospital; he was obstructed again. He was catheterized and kept until Thursday. I took him home again, since he was urinating although he had a bit of a fever; six hours later he was again doing poorly, unable to urinate, and so I took him to the Animal Emergency Clinic in St. Paul for a new set of eyes.

Unfortunately the new set of eyes weren't able to find anything that was overlooked at the University. The options were to hospitalize, unobstruct him and perform a PU surgery. The costs of that were unsupportable ($3100 for the University hospitalizations and another $3300-5000 for the surgery and hospitalization). I called my wife who was in Detroit on business (at 2:00 AM there) to discuss the options. After much soul searching and agonizing, we opted for euthanasia.

It was quick and peaceful. He was obviously in pain and distressed, no longer the happy snuggly boy he had been for the three years he was with us. Even though it feels like the right decision- just an hour later- it's still a very sad conclusion to a very unhappy week.

Be at peace, Fionnster! We will miss you very, very much. When I wake up this morning and you are not at the foot of the bed, it is going to feel very empty. But that's what happens when those who share our lives and enrich us have to leave, the space they leave behind is a testament to what they mean to us.

Sign of the Apocalypse

2010-09-29T18:06:00.005-05:00

I looked into getting ticked for the rescheduled U2 concert at the University of Minnesota stadium in June 2011. Ticketmaster quoted me a price of $275. Each.

$275. $550 for my wife and I. Probably not including taxes and usury.

For a rock concert.

WTF?

In other news, I went for my annual birthday bike ride today with my buddy Doug. We rode from St. Paul to St. Bonifacius and back. 73 miles round trip, most of which was on dedicated bike trails with little traffic, on an exceptionally beautiful fall day. Score!

What I did on my summer vacation.

2010-07-18T13:17:00.006-05:00

I rarely take vacations, partly because I don't get paid time off. A couple of years ago I heard about the Tritone Fantasy Jazz Camps and wanted to go, but the stars did not align until this year. I was able to attend the Tritone jazz camp at Bjorklunden near Bailey's Harbor in Door County WI. The following is a description of the camp and my experiences.

Tritone Fantasy Jazz Camps are week-long residential intensives in playing jazz music. There are two camps per summer, one held at Bjorklunden (part of Lawrence University) in Bailey's Harbor WI and the other at Nazareth College in Rochester NY. The camps are aimed at adult learners.

The camp began on Sunday evening with socializing, an hour long performance by the faculty and then some orientation to what the week would entail. The faculty included Gene Bertoncini (guitar), Rod Blumenau (piano), Mike Hale (trumpet), Tom Hampson (jazz history), John Harmon (piano and jazz theory), Zach Harmon (drums and percussion), Janet Planet (vocals), Dean Sorenson (brass), Ike Sturm (bass and jazz theory), Fred Sturm (trombone and big band) and Tom Washatka (reeds). After this, Gene Bertoncini performed a 90 minute informal recital accompanied on several songs by Janet Planet, demonstrating the value of rapport between musicians in really playing jazz to its fullest.

The schedule started after breakfast each day, beginning with practicing jazz rhythms for 30 minutes with Zach Harmon who, despite being in his mid-twenties was an articulate and thoughtful explainer of the essential rhythms of jazz.

After rhythm practice there was an hour of jazz theory; campers could self-select into beginning, intermediate or advanced classes. The advanced class was taught by John Harmon, focusing mainly on the relationships between scales and chords including both tonal center playing and chord-scale playing. The ii-V-I and iib5-Vb9-i cadences were focused on extensively, as was the tritone substitution principle. Much time was spent discussing the use of the ascending melodic minor scale.

After the theory classes, campers were able to opt into options such as playing in the camp big band directed by Fred Sturm, the guitar choir directed by Gene Bertoncini, or the vocalists and accompanists sessions; the sessions lasted 90 minutes. These activities filled up the mornings.

Afternoons began with small jazz combos which were divided into levels of facility and experience- beginning, intermediate, advanced and very advanced. The lineups had been determined through questionnaires sent out to the campers months in advance. The combos were directed by Fred Sturm and Mike Hale, Ike Sturm, Dean Sorenson and Tom Washatka. Each worked up three songs to play at the final camper concert on Friday evening.

Following the combos were master classes organized by instrument on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Tuesday Gene Bertoncini, John Harmon, Rod Blumenau, Ike Sturm and Zach Harmon discussed their roles and approaches to playing in the rhythm section. On Thursday the faculty discussed their experiences in jazz music and their favorite and/or most powerful musical moments as listeners and players.

After the master classes, Tom Hampson presented an hour on the history of jazz through recordings and giving the history behind the music and the musicians (East Coast jazz fans might recognize Tom's name from his weekly public radio show).

The evening included concerts by the faculty in various combinations on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday followed by supervised jam sessions (one for the less experienced and one for the more experienced) or a singer's cabaret with accompaniment by the faculty. Wednesday evening was a self-directed camper jam session (that went on close to six hours) and a singer's cabaret accompanied by camper instrumentalists. Thursday evening included performances by the singers (one song each), the guitar choir and the big band. Friday evening included more performances by the singers (one song each) and the small jazz combos (three songs each). And with that the camp was a wrap- socializing that evening, breakfast on Saturday morning and then everyone departed.

That covers the bare-bones description of the events. My experience of the camp was uniformly positive, even the hard parts. The accommodations at Bjorklunden were very good and the food was excellent. The facility is a bit sprawling without quite enough conference rooms, so some of the faculty's bedrooms doubled as practice rooms during the day. As a guitarist, I signed up for the "guitar choir" and master classes with Gene Bertoncini and for the small jazz combos. I passed on playing with the big band in favor of working with Gene in the guitar choir.

I should start with talking about Gene. Gene is one of the finest jazz guitarists in the world with a recording career spanning 47 years so far and a performance career a bit longer than that. Gene has been on hundreds of recordings and played with the "Tonight Show Orchestra" and several other TV show bands. He has also been on the faculty of several universities and colleges teaching jazz. As if that weren't enough, Gene is also a warm and genial man with a genuine interest in his students. He is also challenging and supportive, pushing his student to play what they don't think they can play- which is, after all, the point. In my case I am a terrible sight reader of music (a not-uncommon affliction for guitarists. A well-worn joke is that the definition of counterpoint is two guitarists reading the same piece of sheet music). In the guitar choir, Gene assigned me a couple of challenging parts that took many hours of practice and a lot of encouragement to get down. His master classes were freewheeling and covered a lot of ground. Of particular value was his insistence on learning to sing the parts we had to play to internalize the flow of the music. It almost worked; I flubbed several of the phrases I had to play, especially in the song "Mr. Lucky," but I got most of them right at the Thursday performance compared to getting almost none of them right on Monday Our other song, "Stolen Moments" went much better but the reading was also less complex.

As a musician I think I keep pretty good time but there are some things that have traditionally caused me some problems, such as anticipated notes. In the rhythm classes, Zach explored jazz rhythms through breathing, clapping, movement and dance. I discovered my sense of time and rhythm was not as good as I had thought so this was very helpful in correcting this. I had also had a couple of
conversations with Zach about issues that were specifically difficult for me (especially those notes that anticipate the beat) and he was gracious enough to work those into his lessons, which seemed to fix my problem. Zach also talked about his process for practicing those rhythms on a daily basis.

Music theory was something I already had some grasp of so I went to the advanced classes with John Harmon. He was very good at tailoring the material to the classes needs and at demonstrating the sounds in question. John was very warm and supportive, demonstrating that the complexities of jazz theory can be broken down into simple units and assembled into a complete picture of how jazz works.

The combos were an eye opener for me. I had quite a bit of practice with playing in combos of various size through the Jazz Workshop in Minneapolis, but at the Workshop there often isn't anyone really running the show and there is not a lot of arrangement being done. We basically call the song and play it down, do solos, play the head again and out. I was in the intermediate combo with Dean Sorenson as the instructor. Dean is a professor at the University of Minnesota and has extensive experience of playing in touring bands, pit bands, etc. Dean was able to direct, cajole, encourage and entertain us into a tight, good sounding band. We began by learning the Slide Hampton song "My Blues" by ear in Bb, then transposing it to A (which was tough on the horn players, most of whom ended up playing in an unfamiliar key because of the way their instruments transpose). We worked up the melody phrase by phrase, then added harmony parts, etc. It was fascinating for me because I had never really seen this being done. There was also some education about the role of the rhythm section players in this setting that was very valuable to me. The other songs we worked up were "Song For My Father" by Horace Silver and "Poutine Shuffle" by one of the other campers, D. Walter "Smoky" Hinz. The latter was a tune with a heavily syncopated melody which ended up sounding stunning with the whole horn section. By the time the combo performed on Friday night we were tight and sounded really, really good.

These were the essential areas of learning for me but they were only part of the value of the experience. The faculty were, to a person, very warm, supportive and helpful. All of them demonstrated a concern not only for what the students were learning but for the quality of the experience they were having. They were accessible, hanging out with the campers in between classes and in the evening afterwards, making it a very human thing to be a jazz musician. The campers were likewise very friendly with no overt clique-ishness. At meals people often deliberately sat with folks they did not know and were very friendly and open. The end result was learning jazz in a very warm and nurturing environment.

I'm planning to go back next year.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T12:48:00.003-06:00

Well, it's 1/1/10 today. This has me wondering: how the heck did that happen? Back in Ms. Grouchy's fifth grade class at Eugene Field School (my home town's public schools were often named after poets) we had to write an essay on what we'd be doing in the year 2000. I realized I'd turn 41 that year and wondered if I'd ever be that old- that was 30 years in the future and seemed impossibly far off. I went down to the Chicago area to see my Mom for Christmas and on my way out of town to come back to Minnesota I stopped for gas at a place I worked in high school. It's now owned by Chuck, with whom I went to grade school. I've known him for 45 years and hadn't seen him in probably 20 years and surprised the heck out of him when I introduce myself (he'd never seen me with a beard, for one thing). We had about a half an hour's chat, which only lets you gloss over the highlights, and was struck by the obviously honest man he has become- a guy who inspires trust and with whom you'd be glad to do business. That got me thinking about the past turning into the present which will again become the past, turning into the present.

Now it's 2010 and I am discovering the some of the truth of Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" (I'll let you find those lyrics yourself if you don't already know the song). I've been married 15 years, have known my most of friends for over 30 years and have some friends I have known for almost 40 years. The children of my friends and relatives are growing up, graduating college, getting married and my circle of friends has its first grandchild. I've been in my career for nearly 30 years and in my current job for almost 20. My beard is grey, my hair is thinning, little health problems are starting to pop up. In 15 years I'll be 65 and looking at retirement as a "soon" rather than "far off" thing (well, hopefully, anyway. Or maybe retirement will still be "far off" then).

New Year's Day is traditionally a time to think about the future rather than the past, even though the future is always built upon the foundations provided by the past. Turning over the calendar to a new year is an opportunity to decide to try something different in hopes of have better outcomes. This can be done any time, of course, but there's something symbolic about a fresh new year. My main functional resolution is to go to bed earlier and get up earlier so I can be more productive with less stress. The personal, life-enhancing resolutions are to be nicer to my wife and to balance work and life better than I have the past two years. I've made a lot more money but the cost has been a lot more stress, an ongoing sense of exhaustion and increased crabbiness. I want to ride my bike more and waste less time on the Internet (I waste a lot of time on the Internet). And finally to do more things with friends this year. We're not getting any younger.

It's the Snowstorm of the Century!

2009-12-24T13:17:00.002-06:00

Hmmm. Does anyone else think it's premature to call this the "snowstorm of the century" given that (1) we had one just like it in 1991 and (2) there are 91 years left in the century? I've seen at least a half dozen storms very much like this one in the 50 years I've been alive, the first being 23" of snow that fell on the Chicago are when I was a little kid (1967, I think). And for someone who lives in the UP of Michigan or Buffalo NY, this is just a regular old snowfall.

Anyway, a happy holiday of your choice to anyone who happens to stumble across these foolish scrivenings!

Old Friends Reredux and The Joys of Oral Surgery

2009-12-04T12:19:00.004-06:00

A while back I wrote about get-togethers with old friends (at 50-55, we are starting to be old friends). We did it again, Neil's pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner which has been going on every year since the late 1970s. He hasn't missed one. 28 of us sat down to a meal and- not overtly but still- to give thanks for the friendships that have illuminated and blessed our lives for over 30 years. I am certainly thankful that anyone has been willing to put up with me for that long!

Along with this was an interesting side note about how things change. One of my friends's daughters has enrolled in the same college where we went. Despite being a Catholic college, when I enrolled in 1977 until 1981 there was a lot of liberalism there among both the student body and the professors. Even the brothers and nuns were fairly liberal, by Catholic standards. We developed many close friendships that have endured for decades and have let us see each other's children grow up into adulthood and our parents become elders.

My friend's daughter is having a very different experience. Many of her classmates go home on the weekends (almost no one did this when I was in school). They maintain their friendships with high school friends very actively, talking on cell phones daily (there were no cell phones when I was in college and most people kept in touch by letter). They are not developing close friendships with other people in the dorm or in college. They hardly do things together. And the political climate is conservative to neoconservative.

How times change. While I won't say college was the best four years of my life- I have much preferred being an actual non-impoverished adult over being a broke student- college set the stage for the adulthood I have enjoyed. I hope that works out eventually for my friend's daughter.

And now to the joys of oral surgery. Warning: much too much information ahead. The story goes back to getting my adult front teeth. My right front upper incisor came in like a Winnebago motor home- extra wide in a tight situation. When I needed braces, the tooth was root canaled, pared down and crowned. All was fine until May 2003 when I was attacked while riding my bike on the Cedar Lake Trail in Minneapolis. One of the consequences was that this tooth was broken off. My dentist put a titanium post into the root and attached a crown. A couple of months ago I developed an abscess of that tooth and was informed it had to be removed. An implant was recommended and I had a course of antibiotics in the meantime. Today I had the extraction of the tooth and placement of the base of the implant done by Dr. Richard Ballin in Minneapolis.

The procedure itself was amazingly fast, mostly painless (other than the injections for the local anesthetic). My face was numb in about 2 minutes and the procedure started about 5 minutes after the injections. My blood pressure, hear rate and oxygen saturations were tested (136/83, 100 bpm, 96%- more anxious than I thought). The tooth was out in less than five minutes and then I waited with a gauze pack for the bleeding to stop. About that time I realized my heart was pounding irregularly and I felt kind of funky. My BP and pulse were rechecked and a 3 lead EKG was started finding a normal sinus rhythm with an occasional PVC. This was due to the epinephrine in the "Novocaine"- actually lidocaine, I think- which is used to minimize bleeding, but it was a bit freaky (and the sensation of heart palpitations lasted for about two hours before stopping, even though my heart rate was pretty regular). After we established that I was OK cardiac wise, we continued.

A wedge was placed between my teeth to position my jaw. Dr. Ballin inserted a guide into the socket (I think, since my vision was a bit restricted). He packed the socket with bone graft material (the root was very large, necessitating this) and used a series of drill bits to make a hole in the jaw. Then, with a cute little ratchet wrench, he screwed the implant into place. It actually made me laugh. Then a small cap screw was placed into the implant to protect the inner threads, a membrane was placed over the socket and the whole thing was stitched down. With aftercare instructions and a follow up next week, I was good to go. As I type this my face is still a little numb but the anesthetic is slowly wearing off (they said it could last up to 6 hours; looking up lidocaine with epinephrine it seems the average is about 3.5 hours). I have an ice bag to apply to reduce swelling, a bottle of ibuprofen and a prescription for Percocet if that doesn't do the job. So far so good.

The implant will now heal for four months, at which time the cap screw will be removed so that the permanent abutment can be installed and the crown attached. In the interim, I will be wearing a "flipper," basically a 1 tooth partial denture. Or I could leave it out and apply for a job as a carny. I'd need soem tats first.

A nation's debt to Joe Wilson

2009-09-14T21:54:00.002-05:00

The flap over Joe Wilson- a white Southerner- calling President Barack Obama- an African-American Northerner- a liar on national television in one of the very centers of American democracy has threatened to derail the national conversation on health care reform once again. But the nation actually owes Joe Wilson a debt, because he has ripped open the scabs covering the wounds of racism that continue to make our country bleed.

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency allowed many Americans to pretend that the wounds of racism are healing or, indeed, even healed. But watching the news and even the daily interactions between people of different races show that those wounds remain very deep and are freshly cut every day.

I've never met Joe Wilson. Maybe he isn't a racist himself. Maybe he's just another disgruntled Republican bitter and angry that the promised permanent conservative majority promised by Karl Rove turned out to be a lie because Rove misoverestimated the American tolerance for incompetent and ineffective government. In any event, Wilson's words revealed the lie underpinning the Republican Party's pretense to moral superiority and exclusive claim to patriotism which they have been selling particularly since 1980. Ronald Reagan, if he could come back and have a look at these latter days of the GOP, would probably not even recognize this current collection of misanthropes as Republicans.

Wilson's few words and subsequent unwise intransigence showed the depth of the disrespect which has been accorded the first African-American President. Other Presidents have been met with grumbling when addressing Congress, but none have had "you lie!" shouted at them (even when it turned out thatthey had lied). Protesters bringing guns to places where the President was speaking "to exercise their Constitutional right to bear arms" is nothing more than an effort at intimidation in order to keep the uppity in their places. It worked in Mississippi and Alabama and throughout the South for a long, long weary time. Why not again? Protesters shouting for Obama's death are little different than the exultant accessories to murder clustered about the bodies of tortured and hanged black men slung from trees, grinning at the cameras recording their sins.

It is possible and even necessary for the Republicans to bring to the discussion strong criticism of Obama's and the Democrats' health care reform ideas. This is how laws are improved and strengthened in the crucible of debate. Racism- however veneered- disrespect and bitterness undermine the ideals of our republic like the worm in the bud. They are a cancer in the guts of the nation and, if not exposed and rooted out, these things will destroy us.

"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings," sang Bob Dylan. Joe Wilson has exposed the bitterness, disrespect, false patriotism that dogs the Republican Party and the broader racism that still plagues our nation. These are more insidious threats to freedom than was ever seen from the handful of Communists of the Red Scare of the 50s. For bringing this into sharp focus, we owe Joe wilson a debt of gratitude.

Happy Birthday Dad!

2009-05-17T10:01:00.005-05:00

I realized this morning that today would have been my Dad's 80th birthday. He passed away in August 1996 a month after bypass surgery. He had polio at age 6 (in 1935) and after recovering from the polio was found to have developed diabetes. He took insulin twice a day for the rest of his life- it had only been discovered in 1921 and became available as a treatment in 1923 and protamide zince insulin in 1936 (I remember him taking that form of insulin as one of the two he used; the other was Lente. Later he switched to Humalog). I remember him carrying a little case with his insulin bottles and his syringes on every vacation or overnight trip. I remember my Mom's amazing skill at estimating his blood sugar levels with a single glance.

I also remember going to auto races with him- especially USAC midgets and sprints and occasionally stock car races. We went to a lot of races when I was a kid; in those days the USAC midgets came to the local race track (Santa Fe Speedway) three times a summer. By the time I was in high school it was once a year. There's no better racing than midgets on a 1/4 mile dirt track. My Dad used to race stock cars but that was before I was born, so I never saw him race. I've seen photos of the cars and of him racing (including one of him crawling out of his upside-down car). In the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s he acquired a 1930s Crosley powered TQ midget that he restored and took to vintage car races around the Midwest, along with his collection of thousands of racing photos. We used to sometimes go and look up old-time racers to get his photos autographed. I remember spending an afternoon with Fritz Tegmeier when I was about ten, and several visits to see Slim Williams and his wife Gladys (Slim was the subject of the book Alaska Sourdough by Richard Morenus- Alaska was another fascination of my Dad's).

When he died, many of the people he knew from racing came to pay their respects and told me many wonderful stories about my Dad that he had never thought important enough to mention. But that was my Dad- so interested in other people that he hardly ever talked about himself.

So I wish I could call my Dad today and say "happy birthday!" But I can't and it hurts even 13 years later. If your Dads are still around, give 'em a call. I'm going to call my Mom today... and her 80th birthday is just three weeks away.

Old Friends Redux

2009-04-25T22:22:00.004-05:00

I went to my friend Pat's 50th birthday party. When I was in high school there were- like high schools everywhere- a lot of cliques. It's the nature of youth and many humans in general. I went to a small high school (graduating class = 147) so people often had to be in several cliques in order for all the cliques to be represented. My clique was the anti-clique clique. Me, Pat, Dan, Mariann, Jim, Don and Rick hung out together most of the time plus a few more folks here and there. Since graduating from high school, I mainly just kept in touch with Pat. Life goes on and that's the way it goes- people's lives progress and you lose touch. And mortality strikes- Don died from leukemia a few years after graduating from high school, plus several classmates have passed away too. It seems much too early for people who are only hitting the Big 5-0 this year. So, while extolling the virtues of Old Friends in an earlier post, I must acknowledge that the truth is that Old Friends include people who don't get to be old.

So at Pat's party, Jim and Mariann and I showed up from the old gang. It was interesting to find that in many ways these folks are the same as they were and at the same time utterly different. In high school, we had lots in common. As adults in the middle of middle age, life has gone on, things like marriages and divorces and children and careers and professional development have come in. Our lives are much more separate than they were, and yet the relationships in many ways feel the same. Something else- their intelligence and wisdom was much more obvious. Intelligence and wisdom is still under development when you are 17 years old. That's still true at 50, but it's also true that wisdom and intelligence are more developed. My friends are experts at what they do now. They are respected in their fields, they know what they are doing... they are "solid" in a way that just can't be in high school. A funny thing was that we talked very little about high school. We talked about the years since, the things that have happened and have shaped us to be who we are.

There also another difference: perspective. In one's teenage years, every problem and trauma seems big. In middle age, we can put those problems in context. We've gotten through other problems and we'll get through these too. We've had other successes and we know that these are temporary- and that tomorrow someone will ask "what have you done for us lately?"

I was delighted to see my friends at Pat's party. It was just cool to see them, to see who they had become. And, even better, we're only about halfway through (give or take a decade). Who knows how things will go from here.

Old Friends

2009-03-28T23:32:00.002-05:00

I'm old enough now that I have old friends- that is, friends who are old. My best friend from high school, Pat, is having a surprise 50th birthday party. It's not a total surprise, since he knows about it in the abstract but doesn't know the date. I won't mention that here for obvious reasons, even though he- like 99.998623719% of the planet- does not know about my blog.

I've known Pat since 1973, freshman year in high school, when we bonded over being Packer fans in the suburbs of Chicago. Jeez, that's almost 36 years ago. There is something about old friends, people who knew what an idiot you were and thus are able to put in context the idiot that you are now. People with whom you can talk about stuff in a sort of shorthand or code, who can pick up your meaning in just a few words. Sometimes the conversation sounds like:

"Well, I..."

"Yup. Me too."

"So then we..."

"Sure, let's."

It's the sense of connection. Even if you see somebody once a year, the connection is still there and the conversation just starts up where it left off. Old friends.

New Blogs

2009-01-24T10:43:00.003-06:00

As if it wasn't bad enough that I have a blog I hardly ever update, I have started two other blogs to sadly neglect.

About 5 years back in an discussion on the iBOB mailing list, Chris Laumb and I somehow got the idea of starting a local "BOBish" cycling group. We called if "FrostyBOBs" and I put together a Web site. We had talked about having some fun local group rides exploring more interesting places than most of the local cycling clubs did- a mix of on- and off-road, for example. We made announcements, people signed up for getting notified about rides and events... and... nothing. We never got our acts together to do a single ride. Fortunately, Hiawatha Cyclery came along a few years ago and have been hosting some of the types of rides Chris and I were thinking about.

Earlier this year, I decided to stop running the Web server I set up in the back bedroom, so I killed the FrostyBOBs site; I haven't been able to find satisfactory free web hosting (no surprise there) and haven't been able to get URL forwarding to work to send the redirects to the home page my ISP allots me. But I like the idea, still hope to get something going along these lines, and started a blog instead (frostybobs.blogspot.com) and will eventually point the www.frostybobs.org URL to it. And I plan to mail out an announcement to the folks who previously signed up. If you click the link to the FrostyBOBs blog right now, you'll see a fat lot of nothing. I've got to get around to actually setting it up.

The other new blog is for the Jazz Workshop in Minneapolis at McRae Park. About a year ago my wife and some friends went to Merlin's Rest for a few adult beverages and to hear the Hot Club of East Lake. During the break I struck up a conversation with Papa John Kolstad about buying one of their CDs and- my also being a guitarist- ended up talking with him about his rare late 30s Gibson L5; this lead to meeting the entire band and chatting for a while with the bassist/trumpeter Sam Fiske.

I have played guitar for nearly 30 years and most of that time have played a mix of jazz/blues/Grateful Dead music. I bemoaned to Sam the "fact" that there was nowhere for the casual musician to practice playing jazz with other people. Sam smiled and contradicted this, informing me about the Jazz Workshop that meets at McRae Park in Minneapolis every Saturday. Woot! So the next Saturday I turned up and have been going to the workshop ever since. Turnout is highly variable, most often being me, two to four vocalists and a sax player. Sometimes Sam comes to play bass and trumpet, and sometimes there is a drummer, pianist, other horns, etc. I started the blog to try to publicize the workshop, since it is a unique resource in the Twin Cities, in hopes of recruiting more people to come develop their jazz playing abilities. If you click on the link to that blog, there is some actual content!

Starting the new year backasswards

2009-01-05T08:51:00.002-06:00

Today is the start of the first full week of the new year. Thus far I have not spared any time to sit down and contemplate what I want to do with 2009 and already I feel like it is slipping away from me. I've noticed, as have many others before me, that as I get older the years seem to slide by ever faster. 2008 seemed to be about six months long rather than twelve. If I live to be 100, 51 years from now, how fast will the years seem to go by then?

Obviously it's a silly notion that 2009 is slipping away from me. In terms of time, every one of us has exactly the same amount of time: now. We can remember the past, we can project about the future, but we live now. Quite literally we each have "all the time in the world." It's good to remember that sometimes. It reduces the stress a little bit.

Speaking of the past, for Christmas I received a DVD of old home movies which I hadn't seen in at least thirty years. Some of these movies were made at least fifteen and perhaps twenty years before I was born. They feature my mother and her family; she looks to have been about 13 at the time of many of them. My grandparents were younger in these movies than I am now. The movies were made at family holidays and at the weekly family picnics that were held all summer long. Many of the short snippets were filmed at the family cabin near Eagle River WI, which was built by my great-grandfather on land purchased by my grandfather. When I was a kid, my grandparents had retired to live there permanently with the assistance of my uncle. They lived there until my grandfather's death in 1970, my grandmother selling the place a year or two later. Many of my happiest childhood memories happened there at Christmas and on summer vacation, and it was wonderful to see these old movies again.

That was the past. As for the future, I'd better come up with some notion of what I want to do with 2009 before it really does slip away.

Pseudocrisis of conscience

2008-12-18T12:53:00.001-06:00

According to the Washington Post, "The Bush administration today issued a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers -- from doctors to janitors -- who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs."

The gist of the matter boils down to this: "'This is a huge victory for religious freedom and the First Amendment,' said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a socially conservative group that opposes abortion. 'No one should be forced to have an abortion, and no one should be forced to be an abortionist.'"

Part and parcel of the right wing worldview is the belief that they are under siege because of their values. Never mind that they are usually the ones laying siege to civil freedoms for most of the country- the right wing being a small but loud minority that seems far larger than it is, and which has an outsized voice in public policy. As Bill Moyers pointed out in 1991, the delusional right wing is no longer the lunatic fringe- they have been accepted into the front and center of the Republican Party. That this is mainly a marriage of convenience for the real power brokers behind the RNC escapes no one but the social conservatives.

The new policies issued by the Bush Administration are predicated on this same nonsense. There are no doctors that are forced to be abortionists in their practices. Some are required to learn the procedures in medical school and residencies, because moral outrage aside there are legitimate reasons to perform abortions such as fetal death (which occurs in 25% of known pregnancies and sometimes requires surgical intervention to remove the fetus and placenta). But no physicians are forced to perform abortions in their practice- they can and do refer patients seeking abortions to physicians who are willing to provide those services. But now doctors opposing abortion will not even be required to make those referrals- let alone perform the procedure- because that would be a violation of their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Nor will pharmacists be required to fill prescriptions for RU-486 to victims of rape or incest if that violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Even if there is no other pharmacy for 100 miles in any direction. Pharmacists will not even have to fill prescriptions for routine birth control medications if that violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." Heck, for that matter, doctors or nurses or pharmacists wouldn't have to provide narcotics to people with bone cancer if the use of those medications violates their "personal, moral or religious beliefs." You can see where this is going. There is no guarantee that the "personal, moral or religious beliefs" of any health care provider are compassionate or even sane, but now decision that harm patients made on the basis of "personal, moral or religious beliefs" are protected under the law and aren't medical neglect of malpractice.

The fundamental problem with these regulations is this: the health care decisions made by patients are now held hostage to the moral beliefs of the health care provider. The moral beliefs of the patient have been overridden by the Bush Administration. The health care needs of the patient have now been overridden by the Bush Adminstration. If this policy stands, we can expect to see a push from the right wing to send "right minded" candidates to medical school, attempting to flood the ranks of doctors, nurses and pharmacists with anti-abortion social conservatives as a way to prevent access to these services.

Tony Perkins is wrong in his claim that the policy is a win for religious freedom; it is a win for the extreme right wing and is a loss for religious freedom for millions of people with less constrictive religious views. It is not even remotely a victory for the First Amendment. It is a victory for the right wing who believe that their moralist constructions are so radically superior to all others that they should be the law of the land. This policy is a victory for creeping theocracy and another blow against the American Experiment.

A fitting epitaph

2008-12-18T08:42:00.003-06:00

The Bush Administration is naturally trying to find a fitting soundbite-worthy epitaph to shape the Bush legacy. "Protected the Nation" appears to be the favorite. My suggestion would be "Screwed the Pooch."

What a difference four days makes

2008-11-06T20:58:00.002-06:00

48 hours after the conclusion of the US Presidential race, I am still wrapping my head around what happened. The worries for Obama/Biden supporters about the "Bradley effect" and the "Diebold effect" did not come to pass, the hopes of the McCain/Palin supporters for a groundswell in the final days did not come to pass, the national polls proved remarkably accurate, and Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

That was amazing enough. More amazing was the eloquent concession speech made by John McCain. That was the John McCain I remembered from 2000 and missed seeing during the general election campaign. I was moved to tears by McCain's speech, something that has happened only a few times before. It was an exemplar of graciousness. Then I watched Barack Obama's victory speech, also eloquent and stirring in a way I have only seen a few times in my life. I was moved to tears again by the speech and by the naked feelings shown on the faces of long-time civil rights leaders in the crowd.

On my way to cast my vote on Tuesday, I realized that I had long ago stopped thinking about Barack Obama as an African-American candidate for President. I saw him not in terms of color but in terms of intelligence, of measured thoughtfulness and steady calm in the face of attacks. I saw him in terms of policy ideas and whether he projected the leadership qualities I want to see in a President. The color of his skin, the ethnicity of his parents, the false controversy over his faith, was frankly irrelevant to me.

Looking at the crowds in Grant Park on Tuesday night, however, it was clear that for millions of Americans Barack Obama's success as an African-American sounded a resonant peal across the country. Obama achieved something that many people never thought that they would live to see, and in doing so the equality of African-Americans was finalized. Whatever ceilings there might have for African-Americans been have finally been shattered: Barack Obama did not win or lose on account of the color of his skin, but on account of the content of his character.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

"It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

"It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

"We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

"It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America."

Barack Obama will come into office facing the worst conditions any new President has had to face in over a century: a burgeoning depression, a federal budgetary crisis of monstrous proportions, a slow moving but definite worldwide climate crisis with catastrophic potential, escalating worldwide energy demands with shrinking worldwide energy resources, erratic nations with nuclear weapons and increasing nuclear proliferation, and two badly mismanaged wars. Barack Obama will be, must be, up to the challenge simply because there is no choice. The clear majority of Americans put their faith in him and the rest of us must join in to help.

The unmaking of conservatism

2008-11-02T09:43:00.002-06:00

It's been an interesting 28 years. When I was 21, the Republican Party swept back into the Presidency with Ronald Reagan, buoyed by the reformer's zeal to return the country to conservative values and conservative polity. Reagan, a pragmatist in practice while an idealist in rhetoric, did not actually practice what he preached. His administration lowered taxes but did not rein in spending, resulting in deficit spending and spiraling debt. In this he set the precedent for the Republican Party's future and, ultimately, its unmaking. Flash forward to 2008, with a national debt of more than $10,500,000,000,000 (about $35,000 for every woman, man and child in the US on top of their mortgages and credit card debts) and eight years of unconcern for budget deficits. Since 1980, the Republicans have controlled at least two of the three branches of government for 26 of those 28 years. In that time frame, following in the footsteps of Reagan, far more energy has been spent on conservative rhetoric than conservative government. Therein lies the rub, of course. The Republicans have become besotted with power both within government and on Main Street. They bought Karl Rove's notion of a permanent conservative ascendacy and now, facing the ruins of "movement conservatism" as a result of its own excesses, are shocked and awed.

The most troubling trend has been for the Republican Party to follow the notion of the "unitary executive," which holds that the President has the power to basically do whatever he or she wants without the interference of or deference to Congress. This has its roots, as George Will points out, in the Presidency of Harry S. Truman. The stunning concentration of power into the office of the President (and Vice-President, Dick Cheney's will to power being second to none) has proceeded apace and without a look back. In my opinion, this is in direct violation of their oaths of office (I've already commented on this in another post).

I am a liberal and I am more conservative than the Republican Party these days. I believe in balanced budgets, paying down the debt (which requires that revenues exceed expenditures for the next 50 years or so), personal freedom with minimal interference from the government inprivate decisions (including not trying to legislate morality), accountability of government to the people, transparency of government as a prerequisite to accountability, the balance of powers, limited power of the presidency, the separation of Church and State to protect both from each other and especially demanding competence in government functioning. The neocon myth that government is inherently incompetent is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also believe that regulation of business is a crucial role of the government, as is environmental protection, providing an effective social safety net, and ensuring that every person in America has full access to health care.

The Republicans have had a knack for making my political choices easy by fielding flawed candidates with flawed ideas, whereas the Democrats have tended to make those choices difficult by fielding flawed candidates with few ideas (more on that in a minute). I might very well have voted for McCain over Gore in 2000 but the neocons trashed McCain in the primary season, painting him as mentally unstable and unfit for office. They gave me George W. Bush instead and even in 2000 it was clear what type of President he would turn out to be. This year the choice of Sarah Palin as the running mate sealed the deal for me and made it impossible to vote for McCain. It's unfortunate as there is something likable about McCain's history of blazing his own path through politics and taking pokes and the pretensions of both parties.

If McCain and/or the Republican powers-that-be particularly wanted a woman on the ticket, there were far better choices available- Elizabeth Dole or Olympia Snowe leaping to mind. Both would have brought a wealth of experience (Dole's resume is particularly impressive- Senator, Federal Trade Commissioner, U.S. Secretary of Labor, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Head of the United States Coast Guard, 2000 Republican U.S. presidential candidate) and far more electoral votes. Dole would have shored up the South and the Eastern seaboard and Snowe would have provided a wedge into the Northeast.

Which brings us to this election. Barack Obama has turned out to be the more intelligent and better reasoned of the candidates for the Presidency. That trumps the biography issue for me, with all due respect to Senator McCain's lifetime of dedicated service to his country.

Locally we are watching the Norm Coleman-Al Franken-Dean Barkley race for Senate. Coleman, a weak first term Senator, won election in 2002 when the incumbent Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash. Former Vice-President Mondale was named as the successor candidate for the DFL and proceeded to campaign like he didn't really want the job. The DFL managed to bungle a public memorial service to Wellstoen, turning it into a political rally and shabbily treating Wellstone's Republican colleagues who came to Minnesota to pay their respects. Public opinion turned against the DFL candidates in all elections resulting in most DFL candidates for office losing soundly (65%-35% was a typical margin in the House races). In some ways a return to DFL buffoonery, Al Franken was nominated over the superior candidate, Jack Nelson Pallmeyer. Rather than solidly trouncing Coleman, Franken's baggage has resulted in a dead heat with a Senator that many Minnesotans despise as a political opportunist. The only reason it is that close is that the third party candidate, Dean Barkley, is taking more votes from Coleman than from Franken.

Barkley is getting my vote, even though I disagree with him on many issues. Coleman is repellent to me and I cannot bring myself to vote for Franken. I met Franken back in February and was able to talk to him for about a half hour. It was clear that he had little background or ability to be an effective Senator- he didn't listen very well, he showed no obvious ability to be able to write or evaluate legislation on complex issues, appeared to have no background in economics, the environment, national security, etc. Basically he was running because he didn't want Coleman to have another term, not because he had any good ideas of his own that he wanted to get enacted. That's not a good enough reason to be a candidate.

Tuesday is the day that Americans get to exercise their will in politics. I am usually quite disappointed in the turnout in elections, often no more than 50%. In many parts o the world, people have to travel hours or days to vote and may even risk their lives. Here we can't be bothered to go three blocks to a polling place and to stand in line for a half an hour. This year seems to have been galvanizing and I hope that 90% of the people cast ballots. I also hope that, unlike 2000 and 2004, every vote gets counted correctly. The condition this country is in would have been vastly different had the actual will of the people been respected then.

De-Americanization

2008-10-24T17:28:00.003-05:00

The United States, under the impetus of the Bush Administration, is being de-Americanized. Since George W. Bush and, perhaps more to the point, Dick Cheney, took office on January 20, 2000 the civil rights of all Americans have faced rapid erosion. Under the fiction of the "unitary executive," Bush-Cheney have arrogated to themselves sweeping and breathtaking powers to a degree virtually unprecedented since the ratification of the Constitution in June 1788 and the inauguration of President George Washington on April 30, 1789. Every President since that day has recited the Oath of Office:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

George W. Bush- and Dick Cheney- have failed to uphold the oath of office. Rather than preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, these false "patriots" have dismantled it. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom of the people have all been trampled upon in their unbridled grab for power. That power has in the main been used to benefit themselves, their friends and cronies and their political supporters. This used to be called graft and corruption. In a President and Vice President, it should be considered a treasonable act.

Today we'll just mention the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The United States Border Patrol no longer has to respect the Fourth Amendment rights of neatly 200 million US citizens. It has been the legal tradition that the application of the Fourth Amendment is different at the borders of the nation than elsewhere. The Bush Administration has redefined the "border" to be anywhere within 100 miles of the land and coastal borders of the US. The Border Patrol can stop anyone at any time for any reason and demand proof of citizenship, an accounting for the purposes of travel, etc. 200 million Americans live within 100 miles of the land and coastal borders of the United States, and the Fourth Amendment no longer applies to them. See the ACLU Web page on this issue.

What is most ironic is that the force inexorably destroying America from within is not the socialists, it's the conservatives. The economic conservatives allowed the markets to spin out of control through deregulation which will ultimately land us and the world in a depression; the military conservatives have landed us in two misconceived wars without a clear strategy for victory or even withdrawal; the social conservatives continue to try to legislate a narrow white-evangelical-Christian morality (also in violation of the Constitution); and now the conservatives have managed to suspend part of the Bill of Rights.

Those people who are real conservatives, of course, will dislike being lumped in with the Bush Administration which, like its spiritual father the Reagan Administration, isn't even remotely conservative. Sorry about that!

Where am I going and why am I in this bucket?

2008-10-13T08:36:00.006-05:00

You imagine me sipping champagne from your boot
For a taste of your elegant pride
I may be going to Hell In A Bucket
But at least I'm enjoying the ride.
At least I'm enjoying the ride.
At least I'm enjoying the ride.
-John Perry Barlow, "Hell in In A Bucket" by the Grateful Dead

The National Deficit Clock ran out of numbers this week. Created in 1989 when the national debt was a paltry $2.7 trillion, the clock accommodated 13 digit numbers. We now have a 14 digit national debt, about $10.2 trillion (which means that every man, woman and child in the US owes $33,711.38 in addition to their personal debt). Temporarily the dollar sign has been covered over with a card reading "1" and a new clock will be put up that will accommodate a quadrillion dollars. Whatever happened to the Concord Coalition? Whatever happened to the famous Republican fiscal prudence? Well, as Robert Kuttner reported in 2004, they decided that "deficits don't matter.

Eeep! Isn't the "debt doesn't matter" notion a central part of the very thinking that has brought the world's financial markets to their knees in the past month? How has the conservative movement come to this lamentable and incompetent position on fiscal affairs? And, more importantly, is there even a way out of the woods any more? Or have the Grover Norquists of the world managed to permanently poison the well?

And what happens when the people holding those IOUs decide that they want to be paid back?

Obligatory financial market meltdown post

2008-10-12T09:39:00.004-05:00

I made the mistake of looking at my 401(k) balance last weekend and saw that it had lost 31.3% of its value (about 5 years of savings) since mid-August. I am not planning to retire for roughly another 20 years, so this is no reason to stay awake at night. And, fortunately, when I bought my house 15 years ago, I "underbought" a house about $20,000 less than the maximum mortgage I would have qualified for. I bought it using a conventional mortgage on the advice of my realtor (smart man, as it turns out).

So I am not panicking. I hope that doesn't sound smug because I have no reason to be smug. It's not that I am adept at finances; it's that I am conservative (some of my friend- and my wife- refer to me as the "cheap bastard") in my personal fiscal policy. I hate debt, can barely tolerate having a mortgage let alone carrying a credit card balance, etc. I inherited this fiscal attitude from my parents, who were the same way and managed to pay off their mortgage before I got out of high school and have been debt-free since 1975 (when they were 46). I haven't quite been able to emulate them in terms of timeline, being 49 and having 10 more years to go on my mortgage, but in principle I live a disciplined fiscal life. (Not so disciplined in other areas... but that's another post for another day).

What it boils down to is that I make a point of living below my means and find much to be said in favor of this. So within this personal context, I am baffled (once again) by Wall Street and the government. I have been hearing the words "this is the biggest evaporation of wealth in history" being repeated over an over. Here's what puzzles me: given that the law of the conservation of matter and energy has not been repealed, nothing that exists can cease to exist. It may be transformed into another form, but it cannot cease to exist. Since there are no exceptions to the laws of physics, wealth itself must also obey those laws.

Except wealth apparently hasn't obeyed those laws. Hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars (Euros, yen, yuan, rubles, pounds, krona, etc.) have just disappeared in the past two months. This leads me to what seems to me to be the inexorable conclusion that this wealth never existed in the first place. It was fictitious "wealth" and therefore its loss only harms those who were unwise enough to believe that it existed. It existed only as accounting maneuvers on spreadsheets but the dollars were never really anywhere.

What happened? According to Richard Dooling and others, what happened is that some $1 trillion in mortgages (now bad mortgages) were spun into $62 trillion in fictitious "wealth" like sugar being spun into cotton candy. Through the use of derivatives and credit default obligations, which even financial experts like Warren Buffet don't understand, every dollar was counted 62 times (assuming Dooling's numbers are correct) and people congratulated themselves on all their new "wealth." Until gas prices went up, the market value of exurban and suburban houses plummeted, ARM rates skyrocketed and suddenly people couldn't pay their mortgages and banks couldn't get their money back by foreclosing and selling the house. Then, every dollar lost on each one of those mortgages was multiplied 62 times throughout the financial system as all that imaginary "wealth" popped like soap bubbles.

Oops.

Now nearly $1 trillion has already been pumped into the world markets- plus a soon-to-be $700 billion- to try to protect a house of cards from the cruel winds of reality. It will fail, because the truth will ultimately win and that $62 trillion of fake "wealth" will shrivel up under the harsh light of day and blow away. It will be painful and the culprits in this morality tale will, as usual, pass the pain on to someone else rather than shouldering it themselves. In the case of America, homeowners and taxpayers will take the fall. That's unfortunate, because if left to its own devices the financial crisis would have cleaned out the dross and scoured the world's economies clean(er), setting the stage for a return to a more realistic accounting of the world's wealth and taught a vital lesson for investors of the future- just like the dot-com bubble did. Unfortunately, the lesson to be learned from the past month's socialization of the financial markets is that the financial markets can delude themselves into bankruptcy and be rewarded for it.

The source of happiness?

2008-09-14T21:51:00.003-05:00

This weekend I attended parts of the "All British Cycling Event," which has been an annual meeting of people interested in British bikes and British cycling traditions over the past eight years. The event has grown its own traditions and has grown from a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to a three day event taking up most of a weekend. This year, in the British tradition, the weather was cool and it rained much of the time. Despite this, it was a hoot as always. The participants throw themselves into the event with gusto, riding- in some cases- decades-old bike, plus-fours, cloth caps, wool, rain capes, etc.

After getting back from the event this evening I've been puttering around the Internet, in newsgroups, etc. including getting into arguments about tax policy, the fundamental assumptions of political philosophy and the like. Then I read an article on the The Buddhist Channel about the idea that consumerism is defined in many societies as the source of happiness, and yet in practice consuming in excess does not make people happy. The article suggested that appropriate consumerism- not taking more than one really needs, basically- could promote happiness more effectively.

I was reminded of how much fun I had this weekend with the nutters, just riding bikes and laughing with each other. The secrets to happiness may not be all that obscure. Good fellowship with others, cooperation, simplicity, taking no more than one needs and sharing the rest... could it be that easy?

The Republican Party must really hate McCain

2008-09-10T22:07:00.002-05:00

After spending millions of dollars in 2000 to paint John McCain as mentally unstable and unfit for the Presidency of the United States, it must have been an uncomfortable moment for the GOP PTB (Powers That Be) when McCain managed to best the rest of a frankly weak field to clinch the nomination. But what did they expect? Romney was too slick (and a Mormon to boot) to hold the right wing, Huckabee was too nutty to capture the swing voters, Guiliani was waaaaay too New York for most of America to vote for him (not to mention his personal baggage), Ron Paul was... well, Ron Paul.

So they had this uncomfortable "maverick" on their hands, even though he stopped being a maverick in 2000 when he began his campaign to get the backing of the GOP PTB for 2008. McCain won the nomination because he's been working on this for eight years. But what to do with him? What if he wins and doesn't follow the standard Republican script in place for the past 28 years? So what do the GOP PTB do? They squelch McCain's pick for VP, Joe Lieberman, who would have done for McCain what he did for Al Gore in 2000. And they foist off on him someone who will outshine and eclipse McCain at every turn: Sarah Palin.

And look what's happened. Palin is the darling of the left, right and center media. Turn on the TV, there she is. Listen to the radio, there she is. Click on a blog- like this one- and there she is. John McCain? Who's that? This is no longer a campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama- it's a campaign between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. In one fell swoop, the GOP PTB managed to shunt their uncomfortable candidate into the wings and have made him irrelevant. They have put the Democrats off-message and on the defensive. They have made Joe Biden utterly irrelevant to the point that he is publicly second-guessing his own nomination. The GOP PTB have guaranteed themselves a hammer to bash the "elite" media over the head over and over and over anytime they ask a legitimate question about her qualification and competence to hold office. They get to focus on the politics of personality and avoid those uncomfortable problems like the sex for oil scandal, the destruction of personal liberty and civil rights, the slow-motion collapse of the economy, a deeply unpopular war, year after year of record-setting deficit spending, the failure of the government to provide oversight for itself and for the banking and mortgage industries. The GOP cannot win on the issues, so they had to find something else- and find her they did.

Make no mistake: Sarah Palin is the future face of the Republican Party, in sync with the GOP PTB in ways John McCain could never be. She's the female George W. Bush. Meet the new boss- same as the old boss.

John who?

Politiks as uzual

2008-08-06T20:58:00.002-05:00

People who know me know that I avoid talking about politics. They also know I can't say stuff like that with a straight face. I have learned to be a bit more circumspect about where, when and with whom I talk about politics.

Here in Minnesota we have a Senatorial race: the incumbent Norm Coleman (R) challenged by Al Franken (D or, as we say here in Minnesota, DFL for Democrat-Farmer-Labor). Coalman fell into his Senatorship six years ago following the death of then-incumbent Paul Wellstone (an acquaintance of my wife's family; Paul and Sheila were very fine people and that was a very, very hard day). The race had been tight but as election day approached Wellstone opened a gap in the polling which was slowly growing. He'd have won re-election, although not by a whole lot.

Coalman, on the other hand, was a spectacularly bad former mayor of St. Paul who had been elected as a Democrat and then quickly switched parties when he saw the "Gingrich Revolution" and what looked to him to be the ascendence of a permanent conservative majority to which he should suck up if he wanted to have a future in higher office. Forever marked as the political opportunist he is, Coalman lost his bid to be governor to Jesse Ventura (another spectacularly inept politician but good entertainment value). Benefitting from the DFL's fumbling of the ball after Wellstone tragically perished with his wife and several others in a plane crash, Coalman backed his way into Washington where the changing political winds have made him look like a bemused weathervane.

Enter Frankenstein... er, Al Franken. Frankenstein decided that he didn't want Coalman to have a second term. On the whole, this was a wise decision. Unfortunately, Frankenstein decided he was the man for the job of taking on Coalman and getting him sacked. Frankenstein, born in Minnesota but living elsewhere most of his adult life, called on his Hollywood and New York cronies to fill up the coffers. Cough up admirably they did with the enthusiasm of pedigreed cats horking up hairballs. Unfortunately, Frankenstein's lumbering campaign has bumped into his history of sexist "humor," failure to pay various taxes, etc. The media hasn't even begun to explore Frankenstein's Grateful Dead connection and the vast drug use that permeated the first years of Saturday Night Live.

Long story short, Coalman got the nomination for the Republican Party on a voice vote, basically unopposed. The DFL decided they had to do the same thing and persuaded his opponent, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, to drop out in favor of Frankenstein in the first round of balloting at the state convention. Frankenstein came out swearing to hold Coalman accountable for his record, yadda yadda yadda, and started off with a lead in the polls. Then various unpalatable facts came up about Frankenstein, which make him look like the sort of robber baron that most people think the Republicans are, and his lead has plummeted. His coattails have proved long, dragging other Democrats with him, to the point that polls had McCain tied with or leading Obama in a state that the latter was expected to carry easily.

Frankenstein is the biggest electoral gift that the Minnesota Republicans could have gotten. One of the weakest and most vulnerable incumbents in the Senate is now a shoe-in for re-election. Heck, I despise Coalman and even I can't bring myself to vote for Frankenstein. As someone posted on the Star Tribune Web site, Minnesota Democrats should be heating up the tar and gathering the feathers for the DFL leadership. They have worked hard to make sure that Minnesota bucks the national trend and goes red in 2008.

The DFL keeps calling our house three or four times a week asking for money. They're not getting a dime until the remove Frankenstein from the ballot and replace him with somebody worthy of public service. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory! I will be voting for "none of the above."

Esmin Elizabeth Green Day, June 19th

2008-07-02T21:53:00.002-05:00

June 19th should be designated Esmin Elizabeth Green Day. Perhaps you have heard of the story in which this most unfortunate woman developed "agitation and psychosis" was taken by emergency medical staff to the Kings County Hospital Center. After waiting in the waiting room for 24 hours, Ms. Green collapsed off her chair, went into convulsions and died. A security guard looked in on her twice and left the room without doing anything whatsoever to check on or help her. About an hour later someone checked on her- by prodding her lifeless body with their foot- and summoned help, but by that time it was too late.

I cannot tell you how disgusted and infuriated I am by this story. This woman entrusted her very life to that hospital. She was kept waiting for nearly 24 hours without receiving medical attention IN AN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT and died as a result of utter, rank indifference to human life and incompetence. Did she get her medications in that 24 hours? Did she eat in that 24 hours? Did she get a freaking glass of water in that 24 hours? Did she go to the bathroom?

From the available information, this may not have a chronically mentally ill woman. This was a woman who worked in a day care center and as a caretaker for the elderly. She was active in her church. There are a number of reasons why someone might suffer an acute "nervous breakdown" that have nothing to do with psychiatric illness and which, if not treated, could result in death. Six children were deprived of their mother by the criminal incompetence of Kings County Hospital Center and it's parent organization, the "Health and Hospital Corporation" of New York City.

June 19th should be Esmin Elizabeth Green Day and should stand as the day when the American health care system was shamed into admitting that every person is worthy of proper health care, of being treated like a human being with intrinsic value, and the day that we as a country realized that we must, as a matter of moral imperative, assure that everyone has access to health care.

(Mis)adventures

2008-05-25T00:14:00.004-05:00

I lead a pretty boring life. This is not a complaint. I am not an adrenaline junkie and have a pretty low need for excitement. Trying to get a pill into my cat is as much excitement as I need and then some. I like a quiet life.

Today I went out for a nice quiet bike ride. I stopped and bought guitar strings and then rode east on St. Clair, up the High Bridge, then down Ohio Street and out along the Harriet Island road. I picked up the Big Rivers Trail and rode that down through Mendota to the scenic overlook. I planned to pick up the trail along I-494 and ride up past the military cemetery, along Post Road and up through the trail through the park to Hiawatha Falls. Most Twin Cities cyclists will know most of those roads and trails.

On the way down the hill from the scenic overlook at old Hwy 13 and Mendota Heights Road, I came upon a crash scene. Initially it just looked like several people had stopped to rest but as I went by I realized that someone was on the ground and obviously injured. It was a young woman who had crashed off her skateboard, being attended to by her fiance and a couple other bikers who had stopped. 911 had been called. There wasn't a lot to do, although the young woman was clearly in difficult straits. Her fiance said she had had convulsions after the crash, she had suffered a head laceration, had stopped breathing briefly and needed CPR, and was confused and poorly responsive. I rode back up the hill to find the bike patrol officer I had seen earlier but she was nowhere to be found (turned out the 911 operator had contacted her and misdirected her), rode back down to wave down the squad car and point in the direction he needed to go, and then hung around waiting for the ambulance. I had no idea what help I could be, even though I know first aid, as there seemed to be enough people. It just seemed rude and uncaring to leave. The ambulance crew arrived and needed some minor assistance with repositioning her and getting her onto a backboard to get into the ambulance. By that point she was awake enough to answer questions and to follow directions, but was still confused. Even though I had done virtually nothing and the outcome would have been the same without me, the fiance thanked me profusely. They had been out for the day to celebrate an anniversary.

After continuing on my ride, I thought a lot about the situation. The young man had said "just this morning I was lamenting that so few people seem to care about others," and yet three strangers and a half-dozen professionals were there for nearly 30 minutes to try to help (the bike patrol officer was on her first day on the job). I've been in situations where I was injured and needed help, and I found that the presence of others was helpful even if they didn't do anything concrete. Just not being abandoned in a time of need was so important.

I have no idea of the outcome for this poor woman. Head injuries can look horrible and actually be minor, and can look minor and result in lifelong disability. She clearly had suffered a concussion with loss of consciousness, a seizure, respiratory arrest, scalp laceration with profuse bleeding, possibly a shoulder injury, etc. Odds are I will never find out how things turned out. I certainly hope that she escaped with just a cut on her scalp, some bumps and bruises and scrapes. I have seen too many people with brain injuries from various causes in my job.

There was a temporary community around this woman and her fiance. Community and cooperation are vital to human life, even though we exalt individualism and independence in our culture. When the chips are down, though, we know how much we need someone to be with us, even if only to hold our hands.

Reconnections, virtually

2008-05-19T23:45:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, in my job as a psychologist, I had an Arabic-speaking couple who were living in a nursing home referred to me. Not speaking Arabic, heck barely speaking English for that matter, I needed a translator. The insurance company, through a translation services company, sent a young Iraqi-American woman. Not only did she translate the words, she helped translate the culture so that my questions made sense to them and their answers made sense to me. The couple were very kind and warm and generous, despite being in very difficult circumstances, and I enjoyed seeing them; the translator was also very kind and most enjoyable to work with She impressed me at the time with her intelligence and perception.

A few times over the intervening years we have been in touch by phone for one reason or another. One time was when she enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology and needed a letter of reference. I thought she would be an excellent psychologist and I was delighted to help. She has since graduated and obtained licensure as a psychologist in Minnesota. We were later in touch a couple of times again on a clinical matter and regarding employment options. Last month, in response to one of my rambling posts covering too many topics all at once, she left a response to my delight. Clicking through to her blog, I found that she has moved to Dubai with her husband and family; I've only gotten caught up on her adventures through February and will have to finish reading some other time as it's nearly midnight as I start to write this.

One of my early blog posts was about the murder and robbery of one of her family members in Iraq by American soldiers. Her anguish in her statement on the internet was so raw and moving. Reading her descriptions of her life in a new country has been very interesting. One thing it has done is given me a small window on the diversity of Arab cultures- cultures that appear alien and monolithic to Americans watching the news, but which are different just as Californians, New Yorkers and Minnesotans are different- and another is an appreciation of the fact that people are people no matter where they live, what language they speak, what faith they practice. The foibles, failings, strengths and beauties of the human character are the same everywhere. Despite our differences, we are so much alike.

Like many Americans, most of my life I have had little opportunity to get to know people who look differently than I. I grew up in a nearly completely white suburb of Chicago with mainly Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists. There were no synagogues, no mosques, no Buddhists or Hindus. Now in my job I meet all sorts of people- African-Americans, Africans from many countries, Muslims from various places, Jews, Asians from many countries, Americans from different parts of the country, etc. It's fun and I wish I had more time to talk with folks about where they are from. A couple of summers ago we had some Christian missionaries stop by. They were Africans, I am afraid I no longer recall from where they came. My wife had a couple large potted plants called "pencil cactuses" (cacti?) on the front steps, and the missionaries stopped to marvel at them with tears in their eyes. They said that these plants grew all around their church at home and they were so happy to see them. They must have talked about this to others in their church, because last summer some white missionaries came by and said, "Oh, this is the house with the cactuses!" Our claim to fame, I guess.

I have spent very little time out of the US- a few weeks in France, a few days in Canada, a couple of hours in the Schiphol airport in Holland. It is fun to visit somewhere for a while, knowing that one will return home to savor the memories in familiar surroundings. It must be a different thing altogether to leave familiarity behind and move to a new country, with a new language and new food and new social conventions. I thank my old colleague for getting in touch again and sharing her experiences, and I wish her and her family all the best.

Learning, relearning, and rerelearning...

2008-04-17T20:01:00.002-05:00

I should have named this blog "The Occasional Ajiva" since I occasionally live right and occasionally post. Sheesh. Well, part of right livelihood is knowing when to forgive yourself.

A couple of months ago, I was looking at my W-2 form and I noticed that my net pay for 2007 was $4000 less than 2006. Looking back at my records, I had done slightly more work in 2007, so this made no sense. I contacted my boss, who set the billing department to work and figured out what had happened (the person who generally handles my billing was out for two months on FMLA when her mom was ill, which accidentally meant that a big chunk of my services didn't get billed for a while). Now that's all fixed and caught up. But at the same time, my boss sat me down to have the dreaded discussion about job performance and productivity. Suffice to say, I wasn't measuring up- billing about 1/3 of many of my coworkers. Since I am paid on commission rather than by the hour, like many health care providers, improving productivity has an immediate effect on my paycheck. So we reviewed my approaches to my job, identified what could be done more efficiently and more effectively, and off I have gone on my merry way.

Well, and BOOM! Turns out that I was overlooking a lot of stuff that needed to get done. I was making the mistake of relying on others to track this stuff and they weren't doing it, having jobs of their own and all, so I was doing about 42% of the job. Now I am more than twice as busy as I was. On the one hand, I feel better about the work that I do. On the other hand, I suddenly have much less free time resulting in me being fat and grumpy. The marvelous "spring" weather that we enjoyed in March and much of April frosted the grumpy cake generously.

The net result is that while I am earning significantly more money (which will come in handy since the house needs to be re-sided and painted, the bathroom needs work and the kitchen floor needs to be stripped and refinished) I am in the worst shape that I have been in since 1992. And since I was 33 in 1992 and am *ahem* now, this is a problem because fitness and health doesn't come as fast as it did.

I have always noticed that "making a living" and "having a life" seem to be inexorably opposed to one another. Many people I know spend 48 to 50 weeks a year making a living so that they can have a life for 2 to 4 weeks a year. The rest of the time they are wage slaves. I've never wanted to be one of those people, but here I am. Of course, I still don't quite work full time so I should just stop my bitching about it. I am reimbursed well for my services and skills, my work is always interesting and almost always feels valuable. A lot of people don't get a package like that and I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given.

I've just been feeling (and grousing) that I want to be able to ride my bike more. To play guitar more. And to not feel like I have to choose between one or the other. (I could waste far less time on the Interwebs, though, and probably eliminate much of that conflict). But this week I have new food for thought.

I have loved riding my bike for 40+ years. I have ridden almost every day for 8 months a year since I was about 8 years old. In 1992 I started racing, I think mainly to provide a cover story for why I rode my bike so much. I rode 2-4 hours a day for the next 8 years and stopped racing after the cyclo-cross season in 2000. I realized I was tired of training and that I really only enjoyed the post-season bike rides. I rode my bike to ride my bike for a few years and even went on the vacation-of-a-lifetime to the French Alps in 2002. In 2003 my best friend got me fired up about doing Paris-Brest-Paris and I became a randonneur. Again this provided a cover story for hundreds of hours a year on my bike.

This year I don't have time. I don't get home from work until 6:00 or so, most evenings; I used to be home by 4:30 and could, around the solstice, get in the 3-4 hour bike ride every day after work. Now I am lucky to be on the road by 6:30 and a 90 minute ride is a luxury. I was really grumpy about this. This week, though, I decided that I am not going to do randonneur events this year. Bike rides got better. I don't feel stressed that I can't get home and train adequately. If the weather is crappy I don't feel like I still have to go out and suffer through it. So suddenly I am enjoying my bike rides. I'm not worried about maximizing miles, about my average speed, etc. I'm riding my bike to ride my bike.

What made the change, in part, was the appearance in my mailbox of the late and latest Rivendell Reader (it's a nominal quarterly but has actually managed to be published only 40 times in 14 years). The Reader included an article by former triathlete Mark Sisson which pointed out that ultramarathon, ultraendurance sports may not be good for us. That we are not evolved to run or bicycle 4 hours a day. And that the diet which is needed to support those endeavors may not be good for us. I was already aware of parallel research on aging and longevity of some of the points made by Sisson, but reading this from someone who competed at the upper levels of triathlon somehow brought it more home to me.

I don't race. I've ridden a dozen or so brevets from 200 km (125 miles) to 1200 km (750 miles). I've enjoyed about four of them and the rest were "character building." I was already wondering if there was a point to this. I don't need to prove I can ride 600 mg (375 miles) in a weekend- I've already done it. I need to enjoy riding my bike, though. I need to feel rejuvenated, I need to have a little adventure and see the world in a way that I can't from a car window. I need to be able to choose to do something else- like playing guitar or going for a walk with my wife or even working- without feeling guilty or resentful. I need to bring balance back into my life. Jeez, pushing 50 and I still need to relearn this lesson over and over. I hope that's just human nature and not me being particularly slow on the uptake.

So that's the update from the past four months or so. I hope that things in your lives are growing and flourishing.

Circle the wagons, the secularists are coming!

2007-12-08T10:10:00.000-06:00

Like many people, I was interested to hear Mitt Romney's apologia for his Mormonism. As far as speeches go, I thought it was well-crafted and aimed very specifically at a certain audience: the "religious right" (although in terms of theology, I would consider them the "religious wrong"). In this, Mr. Romney's speech was very different from John F. Kennedy's speech about his Catholicism. Mr. Kennedy spoke to all Americans, not just a purported base. Mr. Romney's speech was crafted to alienate much of the middle and all of the left as a way to consolidate support amongst the conservative base. Mr. Romney's speech was a primary campaign speech whereas Mr. Kennedy's speeach was a general election speech.

I am not formally religious. I have studied a lot of Buddhism for the past 30 years but am not a Buddhist per se. I don't belong to a "faith community" and only go to church when family activities require it and not going would offend people I love. I think everyone should make up their own minds about whatever faith they choose to practice (whether the "faith of their fathers" or some other faith that makes more sense to them that the faiths handed down to them) or if they choose to believe in no invisible friends.

I am, in fact, heartily tired of the constant dun of religion in the media. Religion is just not the most important issue in the public forum. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care, the environment all rank higher in importance and in appropriateness for government involvement. Government has no role in religion and, structurally speaking, religion has no role in government. I am sick of the fabricated "culture wars" used to rally the faithful in support of conservative issues.

I am a liberal who sometimes votes Republican and sometimes votes Democrat and sometimes votes Green and even occasionally Libertarian- it depends on the candidate. I believe in protecting the breadth of choice for all Americans and that this is the essence of protecting freedom and liberty. They may make choices I disagree with and even choices which annoy me- that's the cost of being a liberal and the cost of freedom. I don't know if that makes be a "big L" or a "small l" liberal. I find that social conservatives want to take choices- and thus freedom- away from others. It gets tiresome. While conservatives howl about Big Government, they also want to be Big Government and to make government into the Moral Police Department. In this they are no different than the Taliban or the police forces in Iran arresting women for "dressing provocatively" by wearing slacks in public.

For me, Romney revealed something of his true colors in his speech and guaranteed that I will not vote for him. He cannot adequately draw the distinction between church and state, and we've had more than enough of that since January 2001. Ditto Mr. Huckabee. Indeed, making a choice among the available Republican candidates is very difficult. Ron Paul's a nut, Fred Thompson doesn't seem to have either the interest or the competence (I can't figure out why he is pretending to run), Rudy Giuliani has the moral compass of Bill Clinton, John McCain sold his integrity years ago. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton just annoys me and is too right wing for my tastes, Barack Obama is just too unseasoned and should not have run until 2012 or 2016, John Edwards might be a reasonable choice but has that trial lawyer baggage that I don't trust, Dennis Kucinich I like but he would have no chance, Bill Richardson might be interesting but I don't know enough about him yet. Joe Biden has his moments.

In terms of presidential candidates, I don't see anyone in the major parties that I can point to and say "that's the President" I want. I see a bunch that I *don't* want. I haven't looked into the minor parties yet. It's a long way to November 2008.

Old friends

2007-11-18T21:28:00.000-06:00

In 1977 I went to college. I picked a small college about 300 miles form home, in southeastern Minnesota. This weekend I went to the 29th annual pre-Thanksgiving dinner that we have celebrated on the weekend before Thanksgiving. It started in college because we weren't going to be there for Thanksgiving itself, and the tradition has carried on unbroken ever since. Some years we have had nearly 50 people (including spouses and children- a few years, the children outnumbered the adults) sitting down to dinner together. In many ways this has been my "real" Thanksgiving for many years, celebrated with the people who really are, in many ways, my family. And then, on the regular Thanksgiving we celebrate (again) with the families of our births and marriages.

This time I realized that I have known these friends for 30 years. We were freshman together, figuring out what it meant to be out of our parent's homes and on our own recognizance. We did some dumb things. Well, we repeatedly did a lot of dumb things. The special thing about old friends is that you know each other's stupidities and shortcomings- and you love each other none the less. You make room for each others' failings and work around them comfortably.

Every year, I come home nourished not just from the wonderful meal but from being with my friends, celebrating our friendships of many years and looking forward to many more.

Unlocking the chains

2007-10-06T12:26:00.000-05:00

Religion bothers me. Well, that's not exactly correct. Unreasoning faith in nonsensical religions bothers me. Unfortunately the trend in religion over my lifespan is that irrational, unreasoning faith has become ever more "normalized." Religious nutbars are no longer seen as what they are: religious nutbars. Conflicts based in religion rage around the world, shedding blood, destroying cultures, ruining the world. Bitter implacable hatred based on the notion that "my invisible friend is better than your invisible friend" is the leading cause of misery and death on planet Earth. It's evident every time you turn on the TV, read the newspaper or surf the Web. A sub-conflict of the religious wars, especially prevalent here in the United States, is the war against reality waged by the religious nutbars who try to force their religious views into public policy and public education. Sesha Samarajiwa has written an interesting critique of religion that is well worth reading, even if some of it is a bit inaccurate and relies on some outdated notions of psychology. His central thesis- that the world's 4300 religions are in sum total a destructive force in human history- is one with which I agree.

Every religion- with one notable exception- has exactly the same amount of objective supportive fact. That is to say, no religion- again with one notable exception- has any basis in demonstrable fact. To repeat Mark Twain's well-worn sentiment, "faith is believing what you know ain't so." This is the essence of religion. The one exception to this is a non-theistic religion, Buddhism. Buddhism is non-theistic because it proposes no god. Buddhism's central tenets are closer in many ways to the physics of Einstein and to cognitive psychology than to any "religion." Buddhism occupies the role of religion in many parts of the world, but it is not (in my opinion) a religion per se. It is a system of thought and an experiential process aimed at cultivating a clear view of reality and a positive, compassionate approach to living. Buddhist leaders have wisely noted that if science disproves soem tenet of Buddhism, then that tenet must be reconsidered and revised. I can't imagine hearing that from a Christian or Muslim leader.

The excuse offered by many is that it is not religions that are the problem it is individuals. I disagree. These religions create the milieu in which these individuals develop, teaching them their values and shaping their view of the world. It is the religions themselves that are at fault.

Freedom in every step

2007-10-04T20:56:00.000-05:00

Like many people I have been watching, to the extent that it is possible, the events in Burma's "saffron revolution." Buddhist monks began quiet, peaceful demonstrations against the military government's actions against the people of Burma, quickly being joined by a few and then thousands and then tens of thousands of Burmese. Eventually the military government instituted a crackdown on the protests and attempted a media blackout. Monks have been rounded up, beaten, even murdered in Buddhist temples and pagodas. Burmese citizens have faced the same. Villages have been burned to the ground. The suffering of the Burmese people is intense. A collation of Buddhist news resources about the situation is available at The Buddhist Channel Web site.

Events like these remind me of the preciousness of freedom. Growing up in America, it is something I tend to take for granted. It is like the air and the sky- something that has to be breathed and looked at consciously to see its beauty. When I see nations in which citizens risk their lives to stand and vote, and do so in their thousands to make their voice heard, I am moved. And I am embarrassed when less than half of Americans participate in the electoral process. We are one of the nations with the most to lose and every vote is a step in the long walk of freedom. We are by no means a perfect nation or a perfect society and never will be, but to advance our nation and our society takes the cooperation of all of us.

A wise person once remarked that "competition may improve the breed, but cooperation is the only way anything worthwhile gets done."

Today the leader of Burma's military government stated that he would be willing to meet with the leader of the pro-democratic movement. This would be a first step.

An interesting week

2007-09-11T19:40:00.001-05:00

Every year there is a day when it changes from Summer to Fall. Two days ago was it. Saturday was late summer, Sunday was Fall. Ta-da! On Sunday I volunteered for the St. Paul Bike Classic, which my wife and I have done every year since its inception. The SPBC has had a 13 year run and has had really spectacular weather- only one really rainy day which was last year's event. The ride seems to be more enjoyable for most folks when the weather is cooler. About 6,000 to 7,000 people turn out for the ride, many of whom ride rarely if at all. Whole families get out for the ride and it's a great thing to see and be a part of. As usual, I had a great time. I have gone out as the last rider to ride "sweep" for the past 10 years or so, leaving an hour and a half after the last riders- most year by myself but this year with a really nice guy named Randy. One thing that I noticed is that the riders did much better this year. Randy and I only caught up with about eight riders. In previous years, I was sometimes catching people within the first mile. If I was to make one recommendation to families, it would be that 7 years olds are not usually ready to ride 15 or especially 31 miles. They are often game to try, but that's because they don't know what's coming. Some of them make it through the ride just fine, but many do not. Don't ruin cycling for your kid by trying to get them to ride too far before they are ready.

In other news, Fred Thompson has formally entered the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. I think he's got a lock on it. Giuliani is just too twitchy and too New York for the average conservative (being that the average conservative is neither twitchy nor a New Yorker). Giuliani's commanding performance on 9/11/01 just isn't enough to found a presidency upon. Mitt Romney's flip-flops make George W. Bush and John Kerry look like paragons of constancy, and he lacks Bush's and Kerry's ability to blithely pretend they didn't flip-flop. The rest of the Republican candidates- even John McCain- were at best a distant third to Giuliani and Romney, and they have already been outpaced by Thompson after less than a week on the campaign trail.

For Hilary Clinton, this is bad news. Thompson looks and sounds presidential; she tends to sound shrill and strident. It's unfortunate as she is obviously very intelligent and by all accounts a diligent and thorough Senator. We've had enough of non-diligent Presidents. For Obama, Fred Thompson is also bad news. Thompson makes Obama look like a wet-behind-the-ears lightweight even though Thompson's credentials for the office are really no better than Obama's- indeed, Thompson's credentials are arguably worse as he has been out of politics for years. John Edwards might fare well against Thompson, but he is going to have to get his handlers to stop trying to make him look 28 years old. Edwards in person looks ten years older than he does in TV makeup, with a surprisingly craggy face that has a lot of character. He should capitalize on that. Speaking of craggy faces, there is an interesting photo comparison between Fred Thompson and some rather famous Joss Whedon demons.

In other news, Britney Spears is talentless and fat. Well, perhaps not "news" per se. Britney Spears can't sing, but that is nothing new. She has always had an eye for the spectacular and the dedication to sculpt her body to a degree that no pop star beore her has managed. After her "comeback" performance on the MTV Music Awards show, Spears was "roundly" castigated on the Internet and in the newspaper as "fat." Fat? The photos make it quite obvious that she is at the skinny end of the ideal body weight range and that she is about three pounds heavier than she was five years ago at the peak of her career. Just barely enough fat to soften those washboard abs that were so famous. And this after having two children. In an age in which young girls are bombarded with both skeletal role models and supersized nutritionally-free junk food advertising, I thought that Spears look refreshingly normal and healthy in the photos and videos. To be sure, she still can't sing and her dancing lacked energy, fire or even interest on her part let alone anyone else's. But fat she certainly wasn't. I think that the idiots who have called her this were just waiting for any excuse to savage a woman whose life has become a very public train wreck. It's like kicking someone when they are down and shows the despicability and cowardice of most self-appointed critics.

And finally, we have been given the solution to the Iraq war, courtesy of Osama bin Laden in one of the most incompetent marketing ploys in all of human history. The solution is for Americans to convert to Islam. Are you listening, America? That's all you have to do. Toss out those Bibles and Torahs and buy Korans and then al Qaeda will leave you alone. I can't decide if bin Laden is naive or delusional if he has any thought that Americans will turn to a religion that is used on a daily basis as a pretext to murder innocent people. Oops, well, yes, Americans have already done that in their embrace of Christianity given the history of that particular faith. So why would they change? On the upside, Christianity has largely outgrown that particular form of religious adolescence. There are a few stragglers who haven't grown up yet, like Pat Robertson.

When the founders of the United States created a secular nation, they sure knew what they were about. There are very good reasons why church and state should be held separate.

Know who grows your food

2007-08-31T12:45:00.000-05:00

Today I read a Star Tribune editorial on the "Minnesota Cooks" program at the Minnesota State Fair. I read it with a fair bit of pride because my wife was one of the creators of "Minnesota Cooks" back in 2002. Like many great ideas, once the notion was in place it seemed to take off of its own accord. As I remember it (edit: always a questionable resource), my wife and a colleague came up with the idea, the Minnesota Farmer's Union jumped in enthusiastically and provided space at its State Fair booth, and local chefs and food producers donated their time and products (edit: my wife corrects my recollection and tells me that there were about a half-dozen people from different organizations involved in the creation of"Minnesota Cooks" and that more information is available at the MFU and Land Stewardship Project Web sites).
The end result had multiple dimensions: showing off the wonderful skills of Minnesota's best chefs, the incredible quality of fresh locally grown food, the shared goals and the power of the teamwork of different agricultural organizations highlighting the economic benefits for small farmers and the ecological advantages of moving away from the "factory farm" model so prevalent today. Five years later, the "Minnesota Cooks" program is a highlight of the State Fair.

The Star Tribune editorial goes on to point out the wider benefits of consumers choosing locally-produced food products. Modern agribusiness is about economy of scale and efficiency, but its astonishing successes have come with significant downsides. In the past 100 years, the percentage of the American population that are farmers has dropped from something like 25% to something like 2%. This has decimated the social and economic life of rural communities across the country. The reality of modern farming is closer to strip mining than the the bucolic vision of farm life held by most of the 98% of Americans that do not farm.

There has been, however, an upsurge in farming that focuses on smaller scale, higher quality production. The higher market price for organic milk, meat and produce has allowed many small farmers to make a living- not necessarily a generous living as the average American small farmer's income is far too often right around the poverty line, but a living none the less. When my great-grandfather farmed, it was possible to raise a family of eight on a 300 acre farm. For many years now, a 300 acre farm is basically a hobby and not a way to earn a living, but slowly this is changing through programs like "Minnesota Cooks," the Food Alliance Midwest, The Land Stewardship Project, the Minnesota Farmer's Union, projects hosted through the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and, in particular, the strength of Minnesota's natural food cooperatives and the expanding number of farmer's markets.

If you're at the State Fair, track down 'Minnesota Cooks." And eat local!

Life stranger than fiction

2007-08-29T13:40:00.001-05:00

As others before me have observed, life is not infrequently stranger than fiction. Today's example is Newsweek's report that the Chinese government has made it illegal for Tibetan Buddhist monks from reincarnating without permission.

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

Now, is this something for which the monk has to fill out an application? And does the monk have to be dead when he or she makes the application to reincarnate? Is there a Tibetan Reincarnation Review Committee? And one wonders whether there is discrimination here- for example, can Han Chinese Buddhist monks reincarnate without permission? Or can Communist party leaders reincarnate without permission.

To quote Dave Barry, "I am not making this up." And while it sounds ridiculous, there is an ulterior motive:

But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

China, in a stunning display of revisionist history, decided that Tibet was actually part of China and invaded and occupied Tibet. The Dalai Lama was forced to flee the country in 1959 and has not been back since. There is a sort of Tibet-in-exile in Daramsala India where the 14th Dalai Lama's official residence is located along with thousands of Tibetans who have also fled the country. China destroyed many of the Tibetan governmental palaces and Buddhist temples, installed a military occupation, and has systematically flooded Tibet with Han Chinese to bolster its claim to the territory. There have been reports of genocidal activity by the Chinese against the Tibetans. The Chinese government has also been trying to manipulate the longstanding Tibetan politico-religious government of Tibet by producing "official" reincarnations of important lamas such as Panchen Lama. The expectation is that after the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama dies, the Chinese government will produce its own "official" Dalai Lama who will be raised, educated and inculcated in China to Chinese preferences. The goal will be to end the Tibetan freedom movement.

The world has generally ignored these events and has offered nothing more than scant lip service in support of the rights of the Tibetans to hold and govern their own nation. In the 48 years since the flight of the Dalai Lama, the government of China has been allowed unchecked domination.

For what it's worth, and probably not much, I will not be watching the Beijing Olympics is protest of the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Think of the children...

2007-08-26T14:44:00.000-05:00

I like to think that I am not usually a reactionary. I'm probably wrong about that, but I like to think it anyway. So today's post will be an exception as it is reactionary.

A week or so ago I saw an ad for an upcoming TV program called "Kid Nation." The premise in the ad was that there were a bunch of kids dropped off in the middle of nowhere to fend for themselves, and we get to watch them create a society and an economy. My first thought was "I've seen that before." My second thought was "Oh, yeah, Lord of the Flies. That was it." If you've ever read William Golding's classic story, in which a group of children were marooned on an island without adults, you know that it didn't turn out very well.

Of course, Golding was able to carry out his premise to its logical conclusion. "Reality TV," which is really "fantasy TV," does not do so. It can't. For one thing, there are more people behind the camera than in front of it. There's a director, producers, camera people, sound people, script writers, casting directors, etc. For another, TV audiences wouldn't really tolerate human sacrifice and murder really happening to children.

But nonetheless it is incredibly exploitive of the children. Today I read a bit of the firestorm of controversy that the show has created, and the criticisms I have read seem dead-on. There is also question as to whether CBS violated New Mexico's pallid child labor laws, which raises the question of criminal proceedings against CBS and its employees and whether the contracts signed by the children and their parents constitute "unconscionable agreements." I personally think that the whole premise of the show is so egregiously exploitive that Congress should investigate whether CBS should continue to be able to use the public airwaves. Such a gross dereliction of society's duty to protect children must not be allowed to stand.

Embracing the marginal

2007-08-26T01:26:00.000-05:00

I read some of the celebrity news sometimes, usually in a state of disbelief. The news media- and perhaps world culture at large- seems astonishingly preoccupied with the lifestyles of the young and marginal. They are routinely elevated to "role model" status. In this club we generally find young women, generally seeming physically attractive and at best modestly talented (usually singers or actresses whose fame is outsized compared to their artistic achievements). There are a few characteristics they seem to share in common. First, astonishingly bad judgment in choice of companions. Second, an eating disorder. Third, alcohol and/or drug dependence. Fourth, promiscuity. Fifth, poor taste in clothing and/or hairstyle including a lack of unmentionables (which would get any male arrested in a hearbeat but is tolerantly indulged as a "foible" in these young women). And sixth, a remarkable tolerance of their public misbehavior by law enforcement professionals.

Take, for example, a certain young actress who has had two or more stints in drug rehab this year. She is world famous as an alcoholic and drug abuser, and yet despite being famous for being under the legal drinking age in the US is photographed in bar after nightclub after bar with a drink in her hand. Neither she nor the establishments serving her liquor are prosecuted despite ample public evidence of lawbreaking. It was not until she chased down someone in her SUV and assaulted them, later being found to have alcohol and drugs in her system, that the legal system finally stepped in.

Or, as a more recent example, a young and much-celebrated singer. No, not that one. This one didn't shave her head. News reports indicate that this young singer, reknowned already for her drinking habits but being of legal age in her home country, was widely reported to have been beaten up by her boyfriend. Later she denied this stating that the bruises around her neck, damage to her face, scratches, etc. were self inflicted while she was cutting on herself following an altercation with said boyfriend. As if that were any better, even if not an obvious lie.

Many of these young women, who are in the news almost daily, show multiple obvious symptoms of significant psychological pathology. For example, substance abuse, assaultive behavior, self-mutilation, etc., are highly correlated with personality disorders. As a society, we do not do these women any favors by not intervening earlier to prevent the public train wrecks that their lives are becoming. Elevating such marginally functioning people to star status makes it all the worse.

We do not do the girls who look up to them as role models any favors, either. We've seen this pattern before with male rock stars, too many of whom wound up dead after choking on their own vomit, found floating face down in their swimming pools, murdered by their drug dealers, etc. Do we want to have one of these celebutantes found dead from a drug overdose, or raped and murdered, or wrapped around a tree while driving drunk and/or high?

My vote is no, but there's nothign I can do about it either. At the very least, if you have young daughters sit down with them and teach them the rights and wrongs of these behaviors before you're sitting in court at the arraignment of your bald, self-mutilated alcoholic daughter who got arrested on a DWI. Or worse- identifying her for the coroner.

Post turtle

2007-08-07T16:30:00.001-05:00

I believe that this comes originally from Molly Ivins:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year-old Texas rancher, whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to former Texas Governor, George W. Bush, and his elevation to the White House. The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a post turtle." Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road, and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that is a post turtle." The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain. "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the dumb shit get down."

I thought it was funny, anyway.

It's a darned shame

2007-08-06T16:51:00.000-05:00

I saw on the news last night that Jeremy Hernandez, the young man who help evacuate people off of the school bus in the 35W bridge collapse, has been offered the opportunity to resume his education in auto mechanics. Hernandez had had to drop out of the program, which costs about $15,000 per year. That's 50% higher per year than attending the University of Minnesota to get a B.A. or B.S. degree.

Why does a guy have to risk his life in a catastrophe to be able to get an affordable education? The shame of Minnesota's and America's post-high school education system is that it is unaffordable to hundreds of thousands of people. One can understand private colleges being expensive- my alma mater, St. Mary's University, costs $22,000 per year, which is more than my entire B.A. cost in 1977-1981- because private college depend on tuition to pay almost all costs. Public higher education institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, are paid in part from taxpayer dollars with the understanding that this provides society with a significant public good: an educated workforce.

I don't have a solution to this issue to offer. Public universities, community colleges and technical schools are and always will be cheaper than private schools like Dunwoody. We need to strengthen our post-secondary education system and make sure that all qualified students have access. I'm glad Mr. Hernandez will have a chance to finish his education and, frankly, he earned it.

Close calls- and- where do we go from here?

2007-08-03T13:48:00.000-05:00

So far as I know, no one I know was directly involved in the 35W bridge collapse. I am selfishly thankful for this, even while feeling very sad for the five families who are known to have lost someone in this tragedy and even sadder for the families who don't yet know. That must be especially hard. And I am amazed for the people who survived the collapse, all of them with stunning stories. The quick thinking and incredible generosity between survivors in helping each other is inspiring.

But there have been a few close calls among people I know. The Shirt-Tail organizer of the 3 Speed Tour of Lake Pepin drove over the bridge about two hours earlier and his partner had ridden her bike across the Stone Arch Bridge only minutes before. The Quicker Vicar of the 3 Speed Tour was only 10-15 minutes away from crossing the bridge when it collapsed. My brother-in-law's best fried "Walt" had driven over the 35W bridge only a few minutes before the collapse. My wife's co-worker SYB had driven over the very nearby 10th Street bridge moments before the collapse and actually heard it.

The apparent randomness of catastrophic events is often frightening. I doubt that anyone could have predicted that the 35W bridge would collapse at that moment. There were however, 17 years worth of documented concerns based on federal inspections of the bridge. Those inspections found the bridge "structurally deficient." Based on the readings of the documents as presented on WCCO, some of the concerns were worded very strongly. MNDoT reportedly elected to do maintenance rather than adding new support structure to the bridge, planning on the bridge being in service until 2020. After 16 years of "fiscally conservative" governance (moderate under Arne Carlson, extreme under Jesse Ventura and Tim Pawlenty), the latter two governors being basically anti-government, we may be seeing the consequence of the overemphasis on tax cutting generally to the benefit of the already-rich and to the detriment of the middle and lower income brackets.

Quite obviously the gas tax- one of the main sources of funding for road and bridge infrastructure- needs to be increased to may for maintenance and replacement or roads and bridges. 28 states have gas taxes that exceed Minnesota's 20 cents per gallon- Wisconsin's is 32.9 cents per gallon! If you've been in Wisconsin, you'll have noticed that the roads are in much better conditions than Minnesota's roads, especially rural roads. I always wondered why that is, now I know. When I've been out for long rural bike rides, the roads in Wisconsin are so superior to Minnesota's that it's kind of embarrassing. Iowa's roads are also excellent, their gas tax is only 1 cent higher than Minnesota's.

And equally obviously, we need to aggressively pursue ways to give people options for getting around that don't involve driving. Encouraging the development of walkable and bikeable communities would be a huge start. One way to do this would be to encourage the development of decentralized shopping districts- neighborhood shops rather than huge malls and "retail centers" to which one almost has to drive. Otehr ways would be to include sidewalks in every neighborhood, eliminating the cul-de-sac lifestyle in new housing developments, practical bike path placement, improved driver education that teaches sharing of the road, effective bus and rail transit systems.

A single-pronged approach isn't going to work. Minnesota would need to spend probably a trillion dollars in the next 5 years to get everything up to snuff and then an ever-increasing amount annually to keep on top of things. It's just not possible to build our way out of these problems. We need to reduce the percentage of trips undertaken by car. We need to increase the viability of walking, biking, taking the bus or the train (obviously these things tend to work better in towns and cities). Walking and biking are much cheaper alternatives and as such those should be most strongly supported in a wise policy.

In Memoriam

2007-08-01T20:13:00.000-05:00

Tonight, about 5:30 PM my cat Derdriu died. Derdriu had been sick for a long time. In April of last year we discovered that she had a large non-malignant thymoma in her chest. She coped pretty well, getting a bit weaker over time and especially in the last week. My wife and I discussed euthanasia and I spoke with the veterinarian yesterday about it. Since Derdriu seemed to have a respiratory infection, we decided to try an antibiotic. This afternoon when I gave her her second dose, and it seemed to utterly exhaust her. Derdriu was not graceful in submitting to any kind of health car procedure. I decided enough was enough and left a message the veterinarian to schedule putting Derdriu to sleep. About five minutes after that, Derdriu became very distressed and- I think- had a heart attack and died. It took a couple of minutes that seemed to last forever, worse perhaps because it was silent. I petted her and tried to comfort her but I don't know if she was aware.

I'm a big mush. I have been crying off and on ever since. I was glad to be able to be with her when she died and I feel horrible that her last experience with me was something that she hated. If I hadn't given her the antibiotic, she might not have died. Well, not right then, anyway. But her end was very close and now she is out of her suffering. I'm very sad right now and feeling terribly guilty.

Derdriu was an Abyssinian cat, one of two that my wife and I got shortly after our wedding in 1994. The other one, Medb, was the sweetest cat in the world and died from kidney failure about five years ago. I've never had more sociable and interactive cats before. I still miss Medb and will now miss Derdriu. We have another cat that came to live with us a year ago- almost exactly- named Tilde. Tilde is a very nice cat, but she is more my wife's cat than mine. Derdriu was very much my cat and maybe my favorite cat ever. After she died, I placed her in the cat bed that she came with, curled up as if she was just sleeping because it made me feel better to see her that way. That's my last vision of her and the one I want to hold on to. Bye, sweetie, be at peace. No more sickness.

I took Derdriu's body to the veterinary clinic in something of a hurry because they were closing. I had left the TV on in my haste, and on arriving home I saw that the news was talking about a bridge collapse. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the news story was local and that the bridge in fact was the 35W bridge over the Mississipp River near downtown Minneapolis. The aerial footage was unbelievable- nearly a quarter mile of bridge packed full of commuters plunged into the river. The casualties are not yet known, and the stories of survival have been remarkable. The bridge is thought to have been carrying 50-100 vehicles when it collapsed 65 feet into the Mississippi River.

I fervently hope that no one you (or, for that matter, I) know was involved in this horrible tragedy. Best wishes for a full recovery to the survivors and my deepest sympathies to the families of those who did not survive.

Spreading the hate

2007-08-01T19:47:00.000-05:00

On July 12, 2007, Rajan Zed recited- in English- a 3500 year old Hindu prayer to open the United States Senate. This marked the first time that a practitioner one of the oldest religions on Earth had this honor. To no one's surprise, Rajan Zed's prayer was interrupted by right wing Christian fundamentalist protesters. Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar apparently made a special trip to the Senate to protest against a Hindu prayer being recited in the Senate. They were removed from the chamber and possibly arrested, although I don't know on what charges. I don't recall that being a rude idiot is against the law.

The three protesters are reported to have said things like "Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight. This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before You." As they were removed from the chamber, they continues to yell "No Lord but Jesus Christ!" and "There's only one true God!"

When these things happen, I am always struck by how much extremists proclaiming the various religions sound alike. You could substitute the name of any god of any religion without any problem. Religious extremism is marked by a few things. First is the loud insistence on being the One True Religion. Well, that makes sense- if you thought some other religion was truer, you'd convert! Second is an utter disregard for the fact that every religion has exactly the same amount of evidentiary support- that is to say, none. That's why it's called faith. As Mark Twain put it, "faith is believing what you know isn't so." Third is the insistence that the One True Faith is under attack by the powers of darkness. Fourth is the conclusion that the Faith must be defended and the powers of darkness destroyed. Fifth is the belief in exceptionalism, the idea that violating the tenets of the Faith in defense of the Faith is acceptable.

The rhetoric of religious extremism is remarkably consistent across different religions. We also see the exact same rhetoric- with the exact same logical flaws- in politics: the One True Government which is superior to all others, under attack by the Enemies of Freedom (or of The People or The State or what have you), the necessity to defend the One True Government and exoneration from having to follow the law while defending the One True Government. Maybe that sounds familiar.

This is not the path of freedom, not the path of justice, not the path of equality. A free nation allows the expression of all points of view and does not fear difference. A free society makes room for and welcomes everyone, even if they look different, dress differently, eat different food and practice a different faith. If any religion is in fact the One True Religion, then it cannot be threatened by anyone else's faith. The nature of Truth is that it cannot be threatened. On July 12th, Rajan Zed and the Senators who welcomed him made the United States a little more free.

Arming the bad guys

2007-07-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

Today is is reported that the Unites States government is planning a $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Hmmm, this is the Saudi Arabia that has been one of the centers of activity by al Qaeda and which provided the United States with a number of guys who, let's see, flew some airplanes into some buildings back in September of 2001.

It's interesting to me that we have invaded Afghanistan because they helped Osama bin Laden, but not Pakistan which has been even more help to bin Laden than Afghanistan ever was. We've invaded Iraq, which had no connection whatsoever with bin Laden or al Qaeda (President Bush's claims about the link between "al Qaeda in Iraq" and bin Laden and thus 9/11- which reportedly really calls itself "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia," but that'd be confusing for the geographically and historically illiterate American public- overlooks the fact that al Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist until well after the US invasion of Iraq. I suppose that's one strategy: use military activity to create new enemies to justify your military activity). We've threatened air strikes and such in Iran. But the real home to the enemies of the United States is Saudi Arabia, and we're going to sell them better weapons. Brilliant.

At this point, it doesn't matter which Democrat gets elected into the Presidency in 2008. The bar for competence is so low that a chimpanzee could be a more effective President.

George W. Bush and his Administration are the living proof of what happens when ideology trumps reality in the formation of public policy. The New Right- which maintains its power base by exploiting the Christian Right- has a view of the world that is founded on a twisted version of Christianity, one that often explicitly denies and perverts the Biblical teachings of Christ. The Christian Right has colluded with the neoconservatives by reshaping Christian teachings to fit a political model, even down to denying the demonstrable natural history of the Earth itself. This is not faith, this is delusion.

Compare that with Buddhism, whose leaders have indicated that if science proves some tenet of Buddhism wrong then the tenet must be revised. What a spectacular difference! One of the interesting things about Buddhism is how well many of the tenets that have been held for 2500 years accord with scientific findings of the past 100 years: Newton's laws of thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, discoveries in neuroscience in the past few years, etc.

A sound reality-based religion has nothing to fear from science. The Christian right wing's belief that science is a threat undermines the Christian faith rather than defends it. Things like the new faith-based museum of natural history, which seeks to deny evolution and insists that the Universe is only ~7,000 years old, reveals the delusional thinking upon which modern conservatism is based- attempting to twist reality to fit the theory rather than adjusting the theory to the facts.

Blog upkeep

2007-07-20T14:01:00.000-05:00

I noticed today that my last post was on May 26, nearly two months ago. My goodness, time flies when you're having fun. One of the unanticipated things when I started this blog was theproblem of repetition. Being, like many people, a creature of habit I don't tend to have a lot of startling new experiences to blog about.

I could write about my bike rides, but they are mostly pretty much the same. The main differences are the weather, and lately there's been a bit of sameness to that as well. I really enjoy most of my rides but few of them make for compelling reading. In fact, a fairly happy life rarely makes for compelling reading!

And- again being a creature of habit- I don't tend to frequently change my viewpoint of world events. I could continue to condemn the Bush Administration, for example, but sometimes it seems like "what the hell's the point?" It's not like GWB's staff is going to read this blog and say "hey, George, we're gonna do things like this guy says from now on." It's more and more clear that GWB is isolated from reality, the only question is whether this is due to his being actually delusional versus his staff and Cabinet and the VP's shadow government preventing him from knowing what's really going on. I will smugly note that I knew this guy was not in touch with the real world when he first started campaigning for President. It took the Republicans about six years to catch up, but it's clear that they are finally starting to admit the truth.

But that's not news and why belabor it in post after post? Besides, one of Buddhist tenets is to not discuss the shortcomings of others (sadly, I am a lousy Buddhist). Personal shortcoming tend to either be obvious immediately or to become obvious over time, so there isn't much need to trash other people by talking about them. On the other hand, GWB and his cronies are in a position that has allowed them to inflict tremendous harm on the world and suffering on millions of people for the benefit of a select elite, and that should be pointed out. The freedoms of individual Americans have been pinned back with almost unprecedented callousness in antidemocratic ways that prevent the Bush Administration from being held accountable, and in ways that continue to benefit the controlling elite at the expense of the vast majority. We cannot repair problems if we will not look at them and acknowledge them, and we cannot look at them unless we dig them out from where they are hidden. We cannot reduce the suffering in the world without such boldness.

A few weeks ago on "60 Minutes" there was a feature on Joe Darby, the guy who blew the whistle on the atrocities being committed at Abu Ghraib. He lived in fear of his life for months afterwards and has been relocated, basically under a military witness relocation program, for his safety. He has received death threats from inside and outside the military. No one knew who he was until Donald Rumsfeld "accidentally" let slip his name while testifying to Congress. Now he's a marked man- a patriot who stood for the values of this nation over political expediency and personal safety. Such bravery and honor should shame the cowards that hide in the White House, running the nation into the ground for their own benefit.

One of the other segments that night on "60 Minutes" was about the release of Nazi documents about the Holocaust. The Nazis were meticulous, even obsessive, record keepers of their atrocities. Thousands upon thousands of pages cataloging prisoners, their belongings, etc. are finally being revealed. "60 Minutes" allowed us to see those documents through the eyes of three of their victims. The Nazis were not only Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and the SS. The Nazis were also Herr Franz and Frau Hedda Durchschnitt who kept silent while serving in the camps, helping to build the camps, colluding with the rounding up of the Jews and other undesirables.

As has always been the case with shows about the Holocaust, I watched with tears running down my cheeks. And I thanked Joe Darby for his courage in reporting the American atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib. Joe Darby prevented the United States from becoming the Nazis. The Bush Administration may still push us there, but at least in Abu Ghraib the light of truth was shone on the dark side of human nature. It is silence that allows evil to win. Joe Darby was not silent. We too cannot be silent about the evils committed in our names.

War! What is it good for?

2007-05-26T13:19:00.000-05:00

I have opposed the war in Iraq since it was suggested by Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, Richard Perle and others at the Project for a New American Century (there are other views about the PNAC here). The PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton in January 1998 essentially urging him to depose Saddam Hussein. It was not until the more malleable and ideological Gearge W. Bush was installed in office that the leaders of the PNAC- many of whom occupied Cabinet and advisory positions in the Bush Administration- that the dream of the PNAC could come true.

My fear at the time of the PNAC letter to President Clinton was that the Middle East was politically unstable and that military intervention would be catastrophic. Many people much wiser and more knowledgeable than I agreed at the time. Fast forward to September 11, 2001 where we find Donald Rumsfeld telling the rest of the Cabinet that the attacks on the World Trade Center the Pentagon could be a plausible pretext for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. Fast forward to today, with up to 70,000 confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths, 3444 U.S. soldiers dead, and a total of 3720 coalition troops dead. That doesn't include the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers and hundreds of thousands of wounded Iraqi civilians. Some reports suggest there may be as many as 500,000 Iraqis civilians killed as a result on the war.

In addition to these sorts of casualties, there are other casualties: the values and honor of the United States of America, and our standing in the eyes of the world. The United States was once the leader of the free world. Now we are rapidly becoming an irrelevant political force, one that has lost its moral compass thanks to it's leaders' unquenchable drive for riches and power. Americans are no longer paying attention and are not engaged in their government. We pay more attention to Britney Spears shaving her head, Paris Hilton being convicted for stupidity and why Sanjay was on American Idol for so long than we do the the actions of the people some of us elected to office.

In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. Welcome to my nightmare.

I ran across this interview with Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh in which he was asked about the war in Iraq:

What's your position on the war on Iraq?

The day after the destruction of the Twin Towers I advised the American people not to start a war with Iraq, to be calm and ask why have they done such a thing to you. You might have done something; you might have said something that made them hateful, angry toward you.

If you respond to it right away with violence, you will bring about a lot of suffering to your nation and to other nations. But it started right away, minutes after the event. Now people have found that what we said was true.

Have you condemned terrorism?

The word is not "condemnation". It is about looking deeply to see why such a thing has happened. There must be a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of wrong perceptions that have led terrorism to be born.

If you want to uproot terrorism, you have to remove these kinds of perceptions, and that cannot be done with bombs.

Thich Nhat Hanh is quite right. We reacted to 9/11 in anger rather than with self-awareness and thoughtful reflection. It was possible to use 9/11 as a window on the world, a way to understand something of the roots of such hatred and violence, and an opportunity to craft a reasonable and effective response to the causes rather than the symptoms.

We lashed out at whomever seemed plausibly guilty and made no effort to understand why those horrible events happened. The causes of terrorism have been compounded rather than remediated. Now we- and innocent people throughout the Middle East- are paying a terrible price as terrorism rises to unprecedented levels. The stunning incompetence of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their Cabinet and staffs is on display every day, but it only reflects the incompetence of the American people's participation in the democratic process.

There seems to have finally been some improvement in public awareness, but we still seem woefully unwilling to actually look at the roots of fundamentalist Islamist terrorism towards the United States and Europe. We are not willing to consider whether the anger and hatred towards us has a justifiable basis, whether we have in fact contributed to the problem. Without the courage to look at those issues, there is no hope for a lasting peace.

Why do you think they call it "dope?"

2007-05-25T14:55:00.001-05:00

Maybe you're old enough to remember those ads on TV and in print media. I am. Even if you aren't, if you're old enough to read this you are old enough to have heard about doping in sports. Old enough to have heard the allegations and the defenses.

Over the past two weeks we have had the arbitration hearing over the allegations that Floyd Landis doped in the 2006 Tour de France. Landis- the third American winner of the Tour, whom have in combination won half of the Tours in the past 20 years- has denied doping and has waged a very aggressive and expensive battle to clear his name. He has accused the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the French laboratory used by WADA of incompetence. Without reference to Landis's innocence or guilt, the lab did not come off looking very sharp in their testimony. Some of this might be due to translational problems, but in general the witness from the labs really didn't sound like they knew what they were doing. Both sides trucked in expert witnesses with opposing views. There was a sprinkling of soap opera drama with Greg Lemond publicly declaring that he was sexually abused as a child and had confided this to Landis; there was Landis's business manager Will Geoghegan calling Lemond and impersonating the perpetrator in an effort to intimidate Lemond- it was later revealed that Geoghegan made this phone call in Landis's presence; Landis didn't tell his lawyers immediately and didn't fire Geoghegan until the next day during the hearing and later personally helped Geoghegan pack; Geoghegan entered rehab for alcoholism a day or two later; fellow pro bike racer Joe Papp testified about his own doping; etc.

Concurrently there has been an amazing set of breakthroughs about doping in pro cycling: Ivan Basso, Lance Armstrong's hand-picked replacement, admitted attempting to dope with the assistance of Dr. Eufemio Fuentes- himself caught up in an investigation in Spain called Operacion Puerto which has implicated many pro cyclists and other sports figures. Operacion Puerto has cast its longest shadow over pro cycling, however. In the past few days, top-rank pro cyclists from the Telekom team of the 1990s have admitted doping including Erik Zabel, Udo Bolts and 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis.

In the past, there have been only a few cyclists who stood up to admit doping and then only when caught dead to rights. But this week we have had a rash of pro cyclists fessing up, some of whom will face suspensions from the sport as current racers or as team managers, but all of them seeming finally to realize that the only hope of saving the sport is to stop doping. Professional sports are not a required part of society. The thing that makes them interesting is not knowing who is going to win. The idea that the winner or loser may be determined by a choice of drugs at the doctor's office invalidates the very basis of sports. Without honesty, sports stop being sports.

When it comes to honesty in sports, I will admit to being a cynic. Doping is endemic in all high level sports, even at the amateur level. Football players for tiny colleges that will never play in a major bowl game or be seen by an NFL scout dope to gain an advantage. Soccer players and hockey players dope. Baseball players dope. Basketball players dope. And pro cyclists dope. I'd love to believe they didn't but I can't.

The last week or two, as current and former pro riders- even champions- have come forward to admit doping, have shown me a glimmer of hope. The contrast between the Circus Landis on display at Pepperdine University, which was not a paragon of honor, and the frank and forthright admissions in Europe by former members of Team Telekom is stark. I think that those riders should be proud of their honesty and Floyd Landis should be ashamed of the conduct of the people he has surrounded himself with.

Dishonor killings and the insanity of religion

2007-05-21T18:03:00.000-05:00

Today, being a little slow on the uptake, I became aware of the infamous video of the torture and murder of Dua Khalil in Iraq. Ms. Khalil was a 17 year old Kurdish girl who was horrifically murdered by her family. She was stoned, kicked and beaten to death. In public. In front of police officers. By her family. Who made videos on their cell phones to commemorate the event. Her family.

There's a link to the video on the CNN Web page linked above. I haven't watched it. I don't need the nightmares.

Why? Because this girl was seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim man, and someone thought that she had converted from her family's religion (Yazidi). There was no proof. There were no questions asked. Someone, apparently her cousin, thought that she had dishonored the family and had to be killed.

This is insanity. There is no other word for it. Virtually every religion on the planet has, at some time, countenanced such depredations- almost always against women. Virtually every religion on the planet has made the assumption that women are the property of men, that their role is to be subservient, to get screwed on demand and to have the babies and clean up after the men. Most religions on the planet still implicitly or explicitly believe this. Jews stoned adulteresses to death. Christians burned witches- always women- and heretics- both genders- alive. Muslims stone people to death- seemingly most often women- under Islamic law. We've met the barbarians at the gates, and they go to our churches, synagogues and mosques too.

It's a great scam for men. "Hey, don't blame me. This is how God set things up. You don't like it, have a chat with Him. Now make my dinner and get on your knees." Religions have a remarkable knack for justifying abuse and exploitation by those in power. Every religion believes that it has the ultimate truth, has the fast track to whatever gods they've created for themselves, and that everyone else is damned or maybe not even really human. In any case, they are expendable.

If there is a God, and if that God is just, there's gonna be a lot of really surprised people when He gets around to sorting out the atrocities committed in His name. Maybe starting with the assholes who brutally murdered Dua Khalil.

How I found out that I am not a randonneur

2007-05-20T15:57:00.000-05:00

I am not a randonneur.

That sounds like some kind of sound bite denial against an allegation, doesn't it? The two regular readers of this blog both know what a "randonneur" is, but on the odd chance that you have unfortunately blundered into this blog and aren't familiar with the term, I'll bring you up to speed.

"Randonneur" is a French word. It can be translated as "rambler" or "hiker." In bicycling it denotes someone who participates in a certain style of riding. Randonneuring- which is a Franglais word- is a type of timed riding over specific distances: 200, 300, 400 600, 1000 or 1200 kilometers (125, 187.5, 250, 375, 625 or 750 miles). These rides have to be completed in a specified length of time: 13 1/2 hours for the 200 km ride up to 90 hours for a 1200 km ride. The clock never stops during a brevet. The granddaddy of randonneuring events, called "randonées" (hikes or rambles) or "brevets" (meaning "certificates"), is Paris-Brest-Paris. Held initially every 10 years, then every five and now every four years, PBP is a 1200 km ride from Paris to Brest on the Atlantic ocean and back to Paris. Riders have to finish in 90 hours to qualify for a medal and to have their names inscribed in the record book. For more information, check the Randonneurs USA Web site.

Randonneurs are a unique bunch. These are people who volunteer for experiments in adversity. It's hard to ride a bike that far, in the first place. Add to that the fact that the rides are rain or shine no matter what the weather, mechanical problems, getting lost, whatever. Randonneurs love to challenge themselves and to triumph over adversity.

I wrote about the 200 km brevet just a couple of weeks ago- a harsh and brutal day in the saddle. This weekend was the 300 km ride, the second in a series of four required to qualify for PBP. I am not planning to go to PBP this time, and have riding the brevets this year for their own sake as well as to check out how well I have recovered from knee surgery a couple of years ago.

I went with my friend Doug again, this time in his car. We had to be in Rochester MN by 6:45 to sign in for the 7:00 AM start, which meant getting up at 4:40 AM. Yikes. I have never slept well if I have to get up extra early the next day, and this was no exception. I went to bed at 8:30 Friday night and got to sleep about 12:30 Saturday morning. It was pretty early when the alarm went off! We made it to Rochester in good time, had our bikes ready to go and lined up with the rest of the randonneurs. At 7:01 AM we rolled out, with me leading the way for quite a while. This is very odd, because I start slow and lots of randonneurs like to start out fast. But folks just rolled along behind me for a long time. The group stayed together for over an hour, but the relentless winds (25 mph this time) and several steep hills broke things up. I found myself riding along for a while until I got to the first checkpoint in Stewartville. At that point, Doug, a guy named Vincent and I got together and rode as a group. This is a benefit on a windy day.

A word about Vincent. He was riding a fixed gear (one speed, no coasting) bike. He's ridden like this for nearly 20 years and it's his preferred type of bike. He says it seems easier, but I know from personal experience that the time comes when you would sell your left kidney to be able to coast for a few minutes.

We had seen the first 68 miles of the route two weeks ago, from Rochester to Wykoff. The day was warming up into the mid 80s, about five degrees warmer than was forecast. It was so windy that the warmth really wasn't all that noticeable. We stopped at the checkpoints, bought food and water, rested a bit and would push on. Eventually we got onto new roads, from Spring Valley to Fountain, Preston and the turnaround at Harmony. Between Fountain and Preston, we descended into the Root River Valley, which involved long steep hills going down into and up out of the valleys. Vincent, on his fixed gear, had to pedal down as well as up and couldn't shift gears. The climb out of Preston on CR17 went straight up the hill for well over a mile, gaining nearly 500 feet. It was tough and was compounded by the wind coming down the hill. After that I didn't feel well and was lightheaded, wobbly and nauseated when we pulled into Harmony. In short, I had symptoms of dehydration and early heat stroke.

I drank a quart of Gatorade and a bottle of water and ate salty snacks and sweet snacks. I laid down under a tree for over an hour trying to recuperate and wondering if I could go on. There were few alternatives, though. I'd have had to have waited 8-10 hours for Doug to ride back to get his car and to drive to Harmony to pick me up. My wife was busy working and with family stuff. After a while I felt enough better to give it a try. Doug, also not doing PBP, was content to wait for me. Vincent also waited, even though this was putting him in danger of ending up outside the time limit. I rode very conservatively out of Harmony, again fighting the wind to make progress. Eventually the road turned and the wind was then helpful, which was wonderful, and we got back to Preston in good time. I hit 47.5 mph going down the hill into town. In Preston we found ourselves riding up the parade route for "Trout Days" past hundreds of bemused townspeople who had to be wondering what was up with all the bicyclists. Out of Preston was another big climb, although not as bad, and then well over an hour of slogging into the wind back to Spring Valley. I still felt not well and had decided that when I could, I would drop out of the ride and make my way back to Rochester by the shortest route.

That's when I knew that I was not a randonneur. A randonneur would finish the ride. Even if it meant riding into the night and not getting back until 3:00 AM (the time limit for this ride). A randonneur would do whatever it takes to finish the ride. That did not describe me. A randonneur enjoys challenging him- or herself and overcoming adversity. I spent both the 200K and the 300K brevets wondering why I was stupid enough to be out there in those conditions. That mindset is the difference between randonneurs and everyone else.

Doug- who is a true randonneur in spirit- left the decision up to me. I decided that discretion trounced valor and we took a shortcut a few miles outside of Spring Valley, abandoning Don and Vincent to their fates. I felt very badly about that- Vincent had very decently waited for me when I wasn't feeling well and was very supportive. Don had banded in with us and was also very supportive and encouraging. Both of them could probably have ridden a bit faster without me. At that point it was four more hours back to Rochester along the assigned route, however, and I knew I didn't have four hours of riding left in me. The shortcut sliced about 11 miles off of the leg from Spring Valley to Stewartville. In Stewartville we checked a map and found our next shortcut, which trimmed off another 10 miles or so. Casting an occasional eye to the massive thunderstorms to the west, we wound out way back to the start/finish checkpoint and marked our cards "DNF." We talked with a few of the fast randonneurs who had finished before us. All in all Doug and I rode 175 miles on Saturday- a goodly distance but not the 196 miles of the official route.

So I am not a real randonneur. I learned this yesterday. I am a "fair-weather randonneur," enjoying the events when the conditions are pleasant and detesting them when conditions are adverse. I have ridden 12 brevets including the 2003 PBP. I wasn't able to finish PBP or the 400K in 2005 due to knee problems, which now seem to be fixed, and didn't finish this one. So one unintended benefit that I got out of this brevet was knowing myself and my limitations a bit better. I don't think I'll be doing the 400 or 600 km brevets this year. I might try a few other events this summer, and another randonneur is putting together a 250 km "brevet permanent" that I'll probably ride. I cleaned up my bike today and it's raring to go out for a ride. So am I. When I can sit on a saddle again.

A mighty wind

2007-05-09T21:20:00.000-05:00

OK, I was trying to find a cutesy and somewhat salacious title for this entry like "When it sucks and blows at the same time" or "getting blown in southern Minnesota." But then I figured it'd get flagged by Alberto Gonzales or something. So instead I chose the title of a slightly funny movie for my report about the 200K brevet.

The Minnesota region 200K brevet was held on Saturday May 9 in Rochester. Organized by Martin Fahje of the Rochester Active Sports Club, the 200K brevet was the first of a series of four brevets that are qualifiers for the grand randonée Paris-Brest-Paris. Every two week the brevets will get longer: 200, 300 400 and then 600 kilometers. Riders must complete all four, in order, to be able to enter PBP.

My friend Doug and I drove from St. Paul to Rochester, where we met another friend, Don, and the rest of the randonneurs. The turnout was good, it looked like 25 riders or so. The weather forecast was not so good- windy with a risk of rain. The wind- the source of my attempted cutesiness- was actually stunning. Never less than 20 miles per hour and often over 40 miles per hour, it turned what should have been a pleasantly long ride into a grinding slogfest. At least it didn't rain.

We left Rochester with a tailwind which lasted only a few miles before turning into the wind, south past Byron and winding to Stewartville. Doug had forgotten his cycling shoes in St. Paul and was riding in a pair of fashionable plastic clogs- he is prone to having "optional adventures" on bike rides. 10 miles an hour was a good pace, 7-8 mph was typical. It was horrible and I constantly thought about putting a stop to my stupidity and turning around. However, Doug and I got separated and I didn't want to drop out without talking to him, not wanting to spend the next 8 hours waiting in my car for his return.

I made it to Stewartville where I met up with a fair number of other riders, plus Don. Doug pulled in a while later and bought some duct tape to secure his shoes to his pedals to make pedaling easier. So much for pulling out and going home. We left Stewartville and headed for Spring Valley. For a goodly part of this leg we had a crosswind instead of a headwind, but that was not to last. The wind was increasing in strength and the grind into Spring Valley was tough. I rode this leg of the ride with Don, who was in good spirits and enjoying his new recumbent, so that helped my morale quite a bit.

In Spring Valley we met the first rider on his way back from the turnaround, Charles, who is normally the first rider on the return leg. He's fast. Not long after we saw a few more coming back through. It was about 9 miles from Spring Valley to the turnaround at Wykoff, almost all into the teeth of the wind across a treeless rolling landscape with nothing to block the wind. Don and I made it, got our cards stamped, and headed back- now with a tailwind.

In the sections with the east-southeast wind behind us, now 25 mph steady and much more with gusts, we sometimes found ourselves coasting at nearly 30 mph. When we were cutting across the wind, our speed was more like 17 mph- still much better than the outbound part of the ride. We reached each control point with surprising speed. The fight with the wind had sapped my strength, though, so I was not able to really capitalize on the tailwind. It was still much better!

Eventually we found ourselves at Byron, the last checkpoing before Rochester, with only 11 miles to go. We first had to climb up the hill by Oxbow Park, steep enough after 125 miles and even harder with a 30 mph headwind. I climbed at about 3 mph. At the top of the hill I was able to ride 8-10 mph into the stiffest wind of the day, but at least it was not a direct headwind. Tottering down the road, I at last managed to return back to the Wal*Mart. I swept up Doug along the way, who had had to stop and take naps twice in the last 11 miles, and finishing a few minutes behind Don.

In the parking lot, savoring the fact that the ride was done, it was hard to even stand upright in the wind. An unbelievable day was over, having taken over 11 hours to ride a mere 200 km.

Picking up the reins again

2007-05-08T22:32:00.000-05:00

This blog has lain fallow for a few months. Basically what happened was twofold.

First, I was unhappy with the blog. I blame my brother-in-law. OK, not really. You might not be able to tell by reading but I was pretty much apolitical until a few years ago. I followed politics enough to know who I wanted to vote for and to send off letters to my elected officials about the issues I felt strongly about. I didn't engage in political discussion or debate, seeing that as a largely futile exercise. Then George W. Bush got installed in the White House in one of the most callow political paybacks in my lifetime. And then my brother-in-law ran for Congress and I was sucked into the vortex. It's hard to get out once you're in. I didn't intend for this blog to be primarily political but post after post after post of political bilge made it into the blog. And not much else. Not so much Samyag Ajiva, if you see my point.

The other reason the blog lay fallow was that Blogger was aquired by Google, a corporation once dedicated to "indexing" all the world's knowledge and doing no evil. That didn't last long- Google now seems more intent on owning all the world's knowledge (and the Internets, too) and has become a monopoly rivaling Microsoft in scope and political machinations. Doing no evil has also gone out the window, with Google being an active collaborator in the suppression of freedom in China and other places. Also not so much Samyag Ajiva. Since I didn't have a Google account, I could no longer log in and write my blog.

So tonight I capitulated and registered a Google account. This is the trouble with monopolism- it limits your choices. I may ditch it and this blog on general principles. Hell, I run my own Web server so I could just publish my own blog via that. That remains to be seen.

I don't know if anyone but me will even read this- the three regular readers I had have probably given up on me.

Honesty in droves

2007-02-24T17:41:00.000-06:00

Last night I went to see Jorma Kaukonen with Barry Mitterhoff at the Cedar Cultural Center. The Cedar is located on Cedar Avenue in the West Bank neighborhood in Minneapolis. Nearly 50 years ago, the West Bank began to transition from an old Scandinavian neighborhood into a center for coffeehouses, folk music, college students, people who found they didn't fit into mainstream 1950s-60s America, etc. Koerner, Ray and Glover were there, as were Willie Murphy and the Bees, Pop Wagner... even Bob Dylan played there before he went to New York City to get famous. When I first started coming to Minneapolis, I found my way to the West Bank which was even then- the mid 1980s- still an artistically focused and kind of hippyish place. The first time I was there, I watched a guy run three blocks after a car to tell a lady she had left her purse on the roof of the car when she drove off.

I've been to hear some good music in the West Bank over the years, although I stopped going to bars because I didn't smoke and didn't want to inhale a pack-of-cigarettes-worth of secondhand smoke. That meant I pretty much stopped going to hear local music. With the smoking ban in effect, bars are now safer for nonsmokers to enter, but I haven't gotten back into the habit of going out to hear music.

But when Jorma comes to town, I go. I've loved Hot Tuna's music since I got introduced to it in college. I saw the acoustic Hot Tuna play at the Cabooze nearly 20 years ago and was very disappointed- it was a weeknight, they started nearly two hours late, were not exactly sober and didn't play very well. Times change, Jorma's sobered up and has a new lease on life musical and otherwise. Jorma and Jack Casady have played in the winter pretty regularly at the Cedar for a few years now, usually in late November to mid December, and going to see Hot Tuna has become part of the holiday tradition for my wife an I.

This year there was no Hot Tuna show, and Jorma and Barry came in February, but it's still good. I went on my own as my wife had to work at the Minneapolis Food and Wine Show; she planned to meet me there if it worked out. So I got to the Cedar a little after 7:00 to get as good a seat as I could. Once inside, they were selling Jorma's new CD "Stars in My Crown" on Red House Records- the first night they were available, in fact. So I bought one and then headed off to find a seat. I went to sit down and got shooed away by a lady who said she was holding seats for 8 people (who must have been in line for the bathroom or something- she stood there like a sentinel for a long time). I found another seat, planted my coat on it, and then went and got a beer. I sat down in my seat and chatted with the friendly folks around me. A show at the Cedar is like hanging out in a really big living room- everyone is always very friendly and inclusive. You'd have to work at feeling lonely and isolated there.

Just before the show started I went to look at my CD. It wasn't in any of my coat pockets, under the chair, etc. Nobody around me had seen it. Bummer! I watched the first set and then, when the house lights came up, saw my wife standing two rows back. There was an open seat next to mine, and Jean handed over her stuff. I told her about the CD. We looked around a little more without success. I headed off for the restroom and on my way I saw, near the place I had tried to sit down, a CD sitting on a chair. I wondered if that could be mine, but figured it was more likely to belong to someone sitting there. I talked to the folks selling the CDs, who said to come back after the show when they had done their inventory, and they'd see if I had maybe left it there by mistake.

After the second set, as we were standing around waiting for things to clear out, my wife asked if I was going to go check with the folks selling the CDs. I was undecided, since there was a big crowd around the table and it looked like it would be a while. As we headed out of our row, I saw that same CD sitting on the chair. Several people were standing around, obviously uncertain about the CD. I went up to them and asked about it, and they replied that they didn't know who it belonged to and that it had been sitting there throughout the entire concert. The sentinel lady was there and reacted with some recognition to me, and we figured it must be the one that I lost.

Ya read a lot of stuff in the news about how jaded and cynical and opportunistic we've become. And yet here were about 1000 people who were all honest enough to not walk off with a CD that didn't seem to have an owner. That was pretty cool!

On top of it the show was a lot of fun, too. Jorma and Barry tore things up pretty well most of the evening. And played a lot- the show started a little after 8:00 and it was after 11:00 when they finished with "Embryonic Journey" with hours of music (and an intermission) to enjoy. I'm looking forward to the next show!

The environment isn't all about global warming

2007-02-03T00:05:00.000-06:00

The release of the IPCC's global warming report has been front page news, and with good reason. But global warming is only one aspect of the destruction of human habitat (and make no mistake about it- environmentalism is about preserving the quality of human habitat. After all, we live here). Tonight I ran across something I wrote a few years back:

I have lived by the Mississippi River since 1977, usually no more than a mile or two away and sometimes only blocks away. I've spent many hours sitting on its banks, watching the water flow by. It's an amazing thing, really more of a long narrow freshwater ocean than a river. The river has moods and tempers which can be felt, especially near the locks and dams where you can feel it pushing against the concrete and steel. In the backwaters it is quiet and gentle, in the summer feeling like the bayous and in the winter like the sub-arctic. Life teems in the river, with schools of fish, flocks of birds and numerous animals large and small living along its banks. From a canoe you can see eagles swooping down to nab fish, or great blue herons stalking them with catlike grace. Huge northern pike swim by just under the surface, ancient sturgeon live there and catfish hunker down along the bottom.

Almost every bike ride I take from my house brings me into sight of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, which merge just a few miles from my home. The river casts a spell on the whole area of southeastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin. In fact, the river still defines human life in the area in much the same way as it has for thousands of years. The very name "Mississippi" is a mispronunciation of the native word for "Father of Waters." Live within a mile of it for a while, and it grabs you too.

About 1980, the Mississippi River Revival was started by folksinger Larry Long and others, inspired by Pete Seeger's movement to rehabilitate the Hudson River and make it clean again. The MMR got volunteers, who went out in canoes and hauled in garbage. Thousands of pounds of steel, aluminum, wood, glass, appliances, motor vehicles, 55 gallon drums, plastic, Styrofoam... hundreds of cubic yards of rubbish taken back out of the water, recycled where possible and disposed of properly where not recyclable. It was hugely satisfying to fill a semi-trailer sized dumpster with reclaimed garbage. It took years, with multiple locations up and down the river in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Winona, LaCrosse, Iowa. This was paired with legal action by Citizens for a Better Environment in Minnesota and Wisconsin to force the separation of storm and sanitary sewers to reduce pollution, to prosecute industrial polluters, to halt agricultural runoff into the river.

Many of America's rivers are cleaner than they have been in 50 years thanks to efforts like these. There's a long way to go, however, and there are signs not a mile from my house warning pregnant women not to eat fish taken out of the river. It's a truly sad thing that we cannot share in the bounty of the earth and its waters because of pollution. Ironically, hunting and fishing were declared "Constitutional rights" in Minnesota a couple of years ago, and yet we cannot safely partake of those rights on the Mississippi River. What good is freedom if there is not clean air and pure water? We are not free so long as our human rights are subordinate to corporate greed and carelessness.

Is progress an option?

2007-01-23T20:31:00.000-06:00

Today in the Washington Post, Liz Cheney took Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats, along with a few Republicans, to task for failing to support the war in Iraq.

Cheney's article makes a number of egregious errors; to get the gist of it, read her editorial first. I look at it point by point.

"We are at war." Yup. A war started by the Bush Administration. A pre-emptive, discretionary war waged under false pretenses that has resulted in the deaths of 40,000 or more Iraqis and over 3,000 US and coalition troops. This was not a war urged on us by an enemy who gave us no choice.

"Quitting helps the terrorists." Terrorists who weren't in Iraq before the war. Terrorists who weren't terrorists before the war, given that George W. Bush has given al Qaeda its best recruiting tool in its history. Ms. Cheney is right that quitting would help the terrorists. Unfortunately, not quitting also helps the terrorists. George W. Bush's war is the biggest gift to Islamist terrorists in history.

"Beware the polls." Only if you're a pro-war Republican. The public clearly understands what Ms. Cheney does not: that the war is unwinnable.

"Retreat from Iraq hurts us in the broader war." The broader war was in Afghanistan. That's where al Qaeda was headquartered, aided by the Taliban. Both al Qaeda and the Taliban are still there, and both are gaining strength because the Bush Administration fumbled the ball when it shifted its focus to Iraq.

"Our soldiers will win if we let them." Oh, the stunning naivete. Truly the simplistic wishful thinking behind this clanger is breathtaking. We're not stopping out soldiers from winning. The failures of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al are what has hampered the soldiers. Engineering a war with just enough soldiers to lose is the problem, following on the heels of liberating a people who didn't want us there in the first place.

Ms. Cheney has served her job as the anti-Hillary hatchet person and pro-Administration shill, but has failed to serve the needs of the people of Iraq nor of the American soldiers serving there.

The problem is not that quitting is not an option. The problem is that progress is not an option. The Bush Administration's incompetence has destroyed an essentially stable nation (albeit one run by a tyrant) that was not a direct threat to the United States. The Iraq war was basically engineered by the Project for a New American Century and the woeful outcome demonstrates the bankruptcy of neoconservative thought.

Ailing health care

2007-01-22T19:41:00.000-06:00

Ask anyone who's been sick- health care in America is expensive. In fact, in the land of the free and home of the brave, health care is more expensive than anywhere else in the world. Considering that we have- as in most things- the best health care in the world, that's no surprise.

It's also jingoistic malarkey. Dollar for dollar, America does not have the best health care in the world. We have the most expensive, but we don't get what we pay for. Countries with nationalized medicine programs such as the UK, New Zealand and Australia spend less per capita and have better health outcomes.

Why is that? It's really pretty simple. The American health care system is designed to make money, not to keep people healthy. That's what your HMO is designed to do. That's what your hospital is designed to do. That's what your doctor's clinic is designed to do. That's what specialists are designed to do. The health care system is designed to maximize profitability. It's the American way.

When my wife was in the hospital overnight last April, the bill totaled $13,000 for less than 30 hours. That included about $1,000 in erroneous charges. Without health insurance to knock about $7000 off the top of that (noted as "provider's responsibility" on the explanation of benefits) and then paying about half of the remainder, my wife could have declared bankruptcy. From one 30 hour stay in the hospital.

The oft-repeated claim is that health care has to make big whacking profits to pay for future innovations. The truth is that a large measure of those great whacking profits are paid to CEOs and CFOs and other high level executives, and paid out to shareholders and paid out to legislators via lobbyists. Many doctors' incomes have actually declined while the corporatization of health care has diverted vast sums of money to executives.

In the Unites States we have a cheap food policy. Subsidy payments are made to farmers to keep the costs of food low compared to many other countries. We have government programs to extend home ownership to the bottom half of the socioeconomic spectrum. We rely on cheap foreign labor to keep clothing costs low. Taxpayers spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on roads. Thus the four legs of prosperity (food, shelter, clothing, and transportation) are made generally available. As a society we consider these as good things and we do not hear frequent calls for cutting the programs that keep food cheap, home ownership in reach of the majority of Americans, and transportation convenient. Oddly, protecting American jobs- the fifth leg of prosperity- tends to receive little more than lip service.

But health care is treated differently. Conservatives complain of creating "entitlement" programs if any discussion of nationalized health care is brought up. The insurance industry, fearful of losing its hold on the halter of the cash cow, lobbies intensely against any move towards a single party payer system. And yet health care- the sixth leg of prosperity- is considered a luxury.

The primary source of health care for Americans is insurance offered by employers as a fringe benefit. This has multiple bad consequences- it adds significant costs to doing business. American businesses are often competing against companies in other countries that don't have to pay a health care benefit, because many countries have nationalized health care. As the quality of coverage declines in an effort to contain costs, employees are shouldering an ever-greater out-of-pocket burden. I pay one-half of my $425 monthly insurance premium out of pocket. My wife pays all of her insurance premium, which is about $300 and gets a partial reimbursement from her employer. Health care in America is not portable. If you leave your job, you lose your insurance sooner or later. If you have a health problem and lose your job, you may not be able to buy health insurance except at a ruinous price.

In my mind there is no doubt. We must move towards a single party payer system that folds everyone together in one pool. As a healthcare provider myself, I know that the simplification that could be achieved through this could reduce my costs of doing business significantly (perhaps 20%), which could in turn be passed on to reducing the costs of health care. We need to educate Americans and make it a patriotic duty to stay in shape, eat healthy, and practice good preventive health care. Every American should be able to walk into any health care provider and have equal access to quality health care. We need to eliminate insurance companies who add billions of dollars to the cost of health care for their own profit while providing no benefit to the patient.

President Bush will reportedly be making some announcements about health care in his State of the Union address. I doubt any of these ideas will be implemented.

President Obama, I presume?

2007-01-16T12:57:00.000-06:00

Senator Barack Obama has stated that he will be forming an exploratory committee to consider running for President in 2008.

Obama is the brightest star in the firmament of the Democratic Party. His speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was breathtaking in its scope and clarity of values. It was Obama who provided the keynote for the entire proceedings, not John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton or any of the rest of the usual suspects. It was Obama who inspired. Bright, articulate, focused and charismatic, Obama holds many of the cards needed to succeed in a campaign for the Oval Office. He just lacks one:

Credentials.

Obama is one third of the way through his first term as a senator. That's it. That's his experience base on the national stage. Relatively few Senators ride to become President because the executive is such a radically different skill set than the legislature. Most Presidents come from the Governor's mansion in various states, although some have indeed served in the Senate as well. And some- Kennedy and Johnson, for example, made the step directly.

I think that Barack Obama could make a terrific President. But he needs experience and seasoning. He might win in 2008 if he runs- indeed, I think he has an excellent chance of winning in 2008 if he runs. But I think that running would be a mistake. We've had enough of Presidents who do not know what they are doing and thus rely on others to do their jobs for them. The consequences for the country and the world have been fair to terrible. Obama needs much more experience in the world of national and international politics as he himself noted a few months ago.

If Obama is the star that he seems to be, he will be every bit as viable a candidate in 2112 or 2116 as he is today. He should wait until then.

Wit and W-ism

2007-01-02T18:33:00.000-06:00

There are a number of Web sites that collate the wit and W-ism of George W. Bush. You know, anybody whose words are under intense public scrutiny- like the President of the United States- is going to come off sounding like a doofus sometimes. No way around it. Be that as it may, the current President seems particularly skilled at mangling the gist of what he is trying to day. Here's a few samples:

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." --George W. Bush, interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

"This morning my administration released the budget numbers for fiscal 2006. These budget numbers are not just estimates; these are the actual results for the fiscal year that ended February the 30th." --George W. Bush, on the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, Washington, D.C., Oct. 11, 2006

"The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done." --George W. Bush, Greeley, Colo., Nov. 4, 2006

"Anybody who is in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words." --interview with Rush Limbaugh, Nov. 1, 2006

"I've reminded the prime minister—the American people, Mr. Prime Minister, over the past months that it was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship."—Washington, D.C., June 29, 2006

See more of the wit and W-ism of George W. Bush at:

Bushisms

Slate Magazine

The new spirit of bipartisanship

2007-01-02T18:16:00.000-06:00

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was inaugurated for his second term today, and in so doing called for "a spirit of civility" in a speech that cleverly aped a number of W-isms. Pawlenty- whose first term had been notable for his shoot-from-the-lip style and a marked lack of civility towards Democrats or even moderates- has suddenly found the religion of bipartisanship. Funny how scraping through an election by the skin of your teeth (and in which your party suffers huge losses) brings one to the table in a spirit of cooperation.

Pawlenty also put Minnesota on notice that our public school system "was largely designed in a bygone era, for students with bygone behaviors -- preparing for a bygone economy." Hmm, wait a minute. The current educational system was already overhauled by the Republicans, with the goal of leaving no child behind. Is Pawlenty telling us that the Republicans have failed us in our schools?

I actually do hope that Pawlenty and the DFL-led legislature do manage to work together. Mr. Pawlenty will have to learn how to bend his notoriously stiff neck and to check out different ways of looking at things to succeed. Of course, if he is too effective at working with the Democrats he will imperil his dreams of occupying the second banana position in a Presidential campaign. Ambition and aspiration, combined with political reality, might put Mr. Pawlenty on the knife's edge. I don't envy him.

A mixed year

2006-12-30T17:35:00.000-06:00

2006 was, as is always the case, a mixed year. Wonderful news and horrible news were mixed with news of uncertain import.

One the wonderful news front, breast cancer rates were reported to have dropped significantly in 2003, the most recent figures available, averting the death of 40,000 women from this disease. The drop was attributed to the decrease in hormone replacement therapy for menopause.

On the bad news front, signs of global warming seem to be everywhere but especially in the Arctic and Antarctic regions where ice sheets are melting and crumbling at alarming rates. Polar bears may be put on the threatened species list due to the loss of the ice sheets, but with current trends in the loss of their habitat they will soon survive mainly in zoos. Here in Minnesota we continue a trend of local warming with the sixth warmest December on record and ten of the warmest years occurring in the past 15 or 16 years. I rode my bike today for an hour and a half, possibly the longest ride I have ever had in the last week of December in the 40 years I have been riding bikes.

On the uncertain news front, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging less than 24 hours ago. How the Middle East will respond to this is uncertain. Some are happy, some are angry; some have celebrated and some have lashed out and murdered others in their anger. I oppose the death penalty. I think it is immoral and unethical. While the guilt of Saddam Hussein is unquestionable based on the evidence, I do not think that the death penalty is ever appropriate. It is not a matter of having a soft spot for tyrants and mass murderers. It is a matter of the moral consequences borne by a society that kills. The death penalty is a descent into barbarism each and every time it is committed. The death of the guilty has no more true benefits for anyone than the death of the innocent.

On the uncertain news front is the Democratic takeover of the most recent national election. At the national level and in many states, the Democrats scored big gains in all levels of government. The Republicans have had 12 years in which to prove that they are ideologically and morally bankrupt, and have given us that proof with great gusto. They have demonstrated a contempt for the poor, indifference at best to the needs of children other than white rich suburbanites, a terminally exploitive attitude towards the environment, ignorance of the oversight responsibilities of the Congress, an astonishing failure to understand simple math and the problems of deficit spending, and a disregard for reality itself. The problem going forward is that there is no reason to believe that the Democrats are going to do any better.

The evolving crisis in elder care continues to develop amidst handwringing by journalists and a paralysis and failure of vision by government. Both have their eyes on the wrong ball: it's not the baby boomers we need to worry about right now, it is the desperate needs of the current elderly who are not being served by the existing health care system. Insurance companies are posting record profits and gigantic pay packages for their CEOs but say it's too expensive to pay for the proper health care of aging Americans. The baby boomers- the most affluent generation in history as well as the most indebted- are paying out of pocket to prop up an inadequate health care financing structure. Baby boomers are spending their retirement savings to pay for care for their parents, which will only intensify the crisis 20 years from now when the baby boomers are in their 80s and 90s. Thousands of elderly- my mother included- found themselves in the Medicare Part D "donut hole" in the last quarter of 2006, suddenly having to pay hundreds or even thousands out of pocket.

The root of the health care crisis is the denial of suffering and of death. We don't want to die, we don't want to lose our loved ones. We do not see ourselves as a part of the world, a world in which all things naturally pass and nothing is permanent. So we take medications that compensate for the consequences of incurable health problems and which keep us going, sometimes for years longer than we would have lived just a couple of decades ago. Quite often those years are years of poor health and dependence on others. I have spent hours speaking to many people over 95 and quite a few over 100. In each case they felt they had lived too long and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The current generation of the very elderly are the longest-lived generation in history. They are "temporonauts," pioneers in time who have few role models and are creating the new meaning of being old. The generations coming after them will be even longer lived: the fastest growing segment of the American population is people over the age of 85. My 85th birthday- if I get there- will be in 2044, by which time I might reasonably expect to be able to live to 100 or even longer. For many lifetimes the outside maximum of human life has been about 120 years, but that may change. Imagine a life where you retire at 75 and live for another 50 years! What would that mean? And what, for Pete's sake, would you do with yourself for all those years?

Our retirement planning is aimed at "the golden years," free from the cares of work and able to spend our time as we wish. Retirement is why people put up with soul-sucking jobs they hate for decades. It's not unlike the goal of most religions- to get through the travails and suffering of life and get to heaven. We plan on retiring somewhere sunny where we can golf and fish and stroll along riverbanks and the like. Some of us will even get to do that in spite of the inevitable inflation of housing prices and the crowding of elderly refugees in those places. But many of us- most of us, in fact- will face the inevitable ravages of time: arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, vision loss, hearing loss, heart disease, cancer. We'll lose strength and vigor, have hips and knees replaced, suffer strokes and heart attacks. A quarter or so of us will develop Alzheimer's or another dementia. We'll sit in our wheelchairs and think of what we used to do and what we hoped to do, if we can remember what it was. Many of us will be bitter and depressed. Our retirement savings will not go to pay for the good life we envisioned but for our health care.

The nature of life is suffering. Birth is suffering, death is suffering, sickness and old age are suffering. To lose what we have is suffering, to not get what we want is suffering. We lie to ourselves and to each other if we believe that either liberal or conservative policies can prevent this. And yet suffering can be overcome. We can look beyond the wheel of fortune, of life and death. We can relax our grip on who we think we are and how we think the world should be. We can practice compassion and kindness towards ourselves and others. Small kindnesses have a ripple effect that is unpredictable and surprising and yet often cost us little or nothing to perform.

My New Year's resolution is to start at least one positive ripple effect each day. One act of kindness, one act of compassion, one moment of generosity. It can be a look, a gesture, a word. A smile, a handshake, a hug, letting someone with two items get ahead of me in the grocery checkout, a phone call to a friend I haven't seen in a while, an e-mail supporting a worthwhile bit of legislation. I cannot change the nature of birth, death, old age or sickness but I can change my practice of my daily life. Ajiva means right livelihood.

A happy and blessed New Year to all.

A cycle-ogical adventure

2006-12-11T18:00:00.000-06:00

This past weekend was pretty nice, weather-wise. For the second weekend in December, highs of 45 degrees F seem unusual. When this happens at this time of year, I feel the need to get out on my bike.

On Saturday my friend Doug called to see if I wanted to get out on our bikes. He suggested riding down to UMore Park between Rosemount and Hastings. UMore Park is a 12 square mile area which contains many odd cement structures. You look at them and you have no idea what they were for. These structures are scattered all over the area, disused with trees growing up through them. I'd never really looked around there, but Doug wanted to check it out as the land is slated for development.

In 1942 the government began moving people off of the land, possibly using eminent domain. A major munitions plant for WWII was built, called the Gopher Ordinance Works, but the war ended shortly after the plant became operational. GOW was intended to manufacture smokeless powder used as a propellant for weapons. The buildings were mostly torn down and the land was deeded over to the University of Minnesota. Some use has been made of it, but UMore Park is over 20 miles away from the University of Minnesota campus. As a result I suspect that it has never been a really useful acquisition for the University.

Doug and I rode our bikes through downtown St. Paul and across the High Bridge into West St. Paul. From there we rode south through Inver Grove Heights and down Blaine Avenue on the West side of the Koch Refinery. Crossing Hwy 42, Blaine soon turned into a freshly graded gravel road which was rather loose and sketchy to ride. Speed was impossible but that was fine as we were looking at concrete structures all around that were mysterious as to their intended purpose (unless the intended purpose was to baffle people 60 years later). On a beautiful sunny day with no leaves on the trees, the vast size of the complex and the wide scattering of structures was evident.

UMore Park is dotted with the remains of the GOW, including the smokestacks of two power plants and the cement remains of dozens of structures. Most of them serve no obvious purpose (unless perhaps if you are familiar with the manufacture of smokeless powder). It appears that the buildings were widely spaced, which makes sense for a munitions plant. There were a lot of structures that looked like huge ten legged cows, if they were sculpted in cement using only right angles. Others were cement walls with a buttress on one side. There were some intact buildings here and there. (See a Dakota County GIS videos for the conditions in 1945 and 2006 here.)

Doug and I rode down Blaine Avenue to 160th St. and then west a couple of miles. We turned north up a side road and then onto an unmarked dirt road that wound into the Park past a variety of old buildings. The dirt road seemed to have seen a lot of recent traffic. We came out on an asphalt road that took us up to Hwy 42, and from there to Rosemount. We rode north on Robert (Hwy 3) to Dodd Road. We were hungry and stopped for a snack at a Caribou Coffee before finishing our ride by crossing the Mendota Bridge and riding back to St. Paul.

We rode 48 miles in a little over three hours, on a beautiful sunny day that was (seasonally speaking) quite balmy. Along the way we had a little adventure, too. What a treat!

The missing Gospel

2006-12-06T23:26:00.000-06:00

I was recently reading a letter to the editor published in our neighborhood newspaper, in which the author spoke of the "Christian tradition of personal freedom and limited government." It's a line I've heard before, usually coming from a social conservative who appears to believe that capitalism and the Republican Party were ordained by God. Many of these folks then go on to spout theology that is frankly antichristian and in many cases directly contravenes the teachings of Jesus as documented in the Gospels- often based on the Old Testament rather than the New Testament. The "Christian tradition of personal liberty and limited government" is another such piece of theocratic doublespeak.

First, there is no personal liberty in the Kingdom of God. It's a kingdom, not a democracy, and pretty much by definition everything in the kingdom belongs to the king. No liberty there. You don't get to vote for God every four years, nor do you get to vote for saints every two or angels every six to make sure they represent your values. You do what the king says or you pay the price.

Second, there is no advocacy of limited government in the teachings of Jesus. In fact, Jesus told his followers to pay their taxes and not to worry about it because taxes weren't important. Government seems to have been not much more than a transitory condition, like the weather, as far as Jesus seems to have been concerned.

I see a lot of pseudo-Christian blather in public discourse that goes astonishingly unquestioned. Jesus has become little more than a justification for prejudice, tossed around to try to keep women and homosexuals in their places. An awful lot is read into the Gospels that isn't there at all- and a lot of what is read into the Gospels is just plain awful.

A few years back I remember seeing David Brooks on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer talking about the "perverted ideology" of al Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups. Those people may indeed have perverted the meaning of Islam (I don't actually know one way or the other, being pretty ignorant of Islam). I was struck, however, by the way in which Brooks and many other commentators overlooked the perversion of Christianity that has infected the conservative side of the social, religious and political spectrum.

Blowing up clinics, murdering doctors, mistakenly attempting to murder the neighbors of doctors, terrorizing patients, screaming hatred at homosexuals, lying to pregnant women, legislating a narrow view of morality... these things are not only antichristian, they are also anti-American. They are even against the tradition of personal liberty and limited government.

The wages of greed

2006-12-05T17:46:00.000-06:00

"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a maxim that has been around a long time. It seems to be true, according to a new study by the United Nations's "World Institute for Development Economics Research" which found that 1% of the world population hold half of the world's wealth. That is a startling concentration of wealth into the hands of about 66,098,053 people. That's a lot of people, given that the Earth's population is estimated at 6.6 billion and climbing constantly (perhaps 200,000 more people per day), but even in this select group the disparity of concentration of wealth is startling. Less than six months ago, the top 400 Americans were found to hold $1.13 trillion dollars in wealth!

By contrast, the other half of the world's population- about 3.4 billion people- hold less than 1% of the world's wealth. Most of those people live on $2 US dollars per day or less- an annual income of under $1000 per year. Most of those people have no access to sophisticated health care and little or no access to even rudimentary health care. Half of the people on the face of the Earth are dirt poor. The American homeless population eats a better diet, lives in better conditions and has a higher income.

As a result one of the leading cause of death in the world is diarrhea- far more people die from the consequences of diarrhea than from AIDS and terrorism and cancer combined. The main cause if diarrhea is drinking contaminated water, and the main reason for drinking contaminated water is poverty.

What is the main reason for poverty? Many things are often cited- political instability in the governments of nations with lots of poor people, lack of natural resources, drought, etc. Those of us who live in wealthy nations see poverty as a local problem that should be solved through local means: education, business development, job creation, infrastructure development, etc. Yet if this were the case, it would be easy to fix poverty and there should- by the 21st century- be no poverty anywhere in the world.

There is another possibility. A compelling argument can be made that the sources of poverty in an area or nation are actually external- forces that find their roots in the wider society. The math is pretty simple in my opinion: the concentration of the wealth of the world in the hands of a few keeps it away from the half of the world living in desperate poverty. In short, the cause of poverty is greed.

That's an anti-capitalist and therefore anti-American thing to say, given that capitalism and the US are synonymous both inside and outside our borders. Capitalism is one of the fundamental values of American society. But it is also one of the fundamental contributors to poverty because it concentrates wealth into the hands of a few and keeps it out of the hands of the many. Changing that dynamic is a matter of conscience and humanity.

The veneer of civilization

2006-12-03T14:40:00.000-06:00

Maybe you've heard of Jerry Klein. I hadn't until today, when I read a news report about his radio show. Klein called for tattooing Muslims or making them wear an arm band to identify them. The phone lines were swamped almost immediately.

Some callers expressed their outrage about such a suggestion. Others called it a good idea and went even farther- deporting Muslims, for example, or putting them in interment camps as was done with Japanese-American citizens during WWII.

At the end of the show, Klein told his audience that it was a hoax and that the audience had demonstrated how deep seated anti-Jewish sentiment had allowed the German government to perpetrate the Holocaust.

Wow. Klein was audacious but did us a favor, ripping the scabs off America's fear of Muslims and Islam. Fear, ignorance and anger are the conditions for a perfect storm of inhumanity. We've seen it before in the U.S., from genocide against American Indians, to burning women at the stake for allegedly being witches, to murdering labor leaders trying to organize workers to get fair pay and better working conditions, to interment of American citizens, to the Tuskegee Project, to Jim Crow, to "rendition" (a polite word for "kidnap") and torture and an immoral war that has cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

Locally Muslims are subjected to hatred and suspicion including threats, assaults, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab graffiti, arson etc. When people are afraid, "Minnesota nice" goes out the window.

The image of Islam held by most Americans is probably that of screaming angry mobs of fanatical looking people in the Middle East. The images of 9/11 are indelible for us- the shock of seeing airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the bodies falling from the buildings and then the buildings themselves falling ruinously into themselves. Most Americans don't know that the largest Muslim nation on the planet is not in the Middle East but in the Pacific.

But that's no excuse. Americans- whose country is in part predicated on the freedom of religion- should rise above this and recognize that only the extremists are extremists. Wearing a headscarf or a turban or praying towards Mecca does not make one an extremist. Unreasoning hatred and anger make one an extremist, and from there it is a very short step to becoming a terrorist. As Jerry Klein showed us, it's not a long walk.

Indecent exposure

2006-12-01T11:30:00.000-06:00

One of the consequence of the American media's obsession with celebrity is that certain celebrities are covered in the news every day- whether they are newsworthy or not. Even though Bono is a rather annoying personality, his appearances in the media generally serve a larger cause such as bringing attention to the desperate poverty from which the majority of the world suffers.

The news of the week, however, has been Britney's Vagina. One of the social euphemisms for genitalia is "private parts" but in this case, "private" is not quite apropos. Now, some media people have basically argued that the Britney Flash is just a logical extension of her longstanding strategy of courting media attention (and CD and concert ticket sales to the tune of a reported $70 million annual income) through sexually provocative or even shocking behavior.

What I am struck by, however, is that Britney hasn't been arrested and charged with indecent exposure. Had the same behavior been shown by, say, Mel Gibson in a kilt complete with public photographic evidence there'd be an arrest. Some guy does this on a street corner and he'd be arrested. Heck, back when I was in college a bunch of students from one of the frats taking a leak in an alley behind a bar and got busted for indecent exposure (plus they were charged, if I remember correctly, for littering). Made me glad I wasn't a frat boy.

But why not Britney? Is it because she is a star? Is it because she is rich? Is it because she is a woman? Her actions are clearly against the law and- given that they were repeated several times on different days- clearly intentional. And oddly enough, there was no mention of Paris's Vagina which was reportedly also on display.

There's an interesting double standard at work here even if it is hard to figure out the basis for it.

Judging America

2006-11-24T11:31:00.000-06:00

I took the Friday after Thanksgiving off. Since it's a (relatively) beautiful day, my plan is to get out for what will likely be one of the last long bike rides of the year. I was surfing the Web over breakfast and checked the TV schedule. I noticed something very interesting.

"Judge shows." Between 10:00 AM and noon there were no less than six of these shows on TV: "Judge Alex," "Christina's Court," "Judge Hatchett," "Divorce Court," "Judge Mathis," and "The People's Court." And since a couple channels had college football games on, there might even have normally been a few more on TV. Checking the afternoon schedule, I could watch more "Judge Alex" and "Christina's Court" as well as "Judge Joe Brown," "Judge Maria Lopez" and "Judge Judy." There are about ten hours of "judge shows" on today and this is just on the broadcast channels- I don't have cable! Judge Wopner, what hath ye wrought?

What is the fascination of watching public shaming of fellow human beings? I am baffled by this. I find these shows incredibly unpleasant to watch. The judges are invariably harsh and unpleasant, primarily dishing out humiliation rather than justice. Justice, in fact, has little to do with the proceedings. The "entertainment" factor of the shows appears to be not educating the public about the law or equitably settling disagreements but instead is the public chastisement of hapless plaintiffs and defendants. There is a strong parallel in other types of "reality" TV such as the various "Survivor" shows, "Fear Factor" and the like and also in talk shows such as "Dr. Phil."

I am not sure why watching the public humiliation of others is entertaining to many people. This is not new, of course. Religions have used public humiliation for millennia, generally in a much more extreme way than "judge TV" shows do. I think that watching the public humiliation of others serves to reinforce our own sense of moral superiority and perhaps also a little thrill if we do the same things but get away with it.

Human beings are more alike than they are different. We all have the seeds of good and bad within us. The circumstances of our lives promote or inhibit the growth of those seeds, making good actions or bad actions more likely. To be sure we also have some power to make choices, but our ability to make choices is not unlimited. Life may present us a selection of bad or worse choices but no good choices. Justice comes from looking deeply into the person and the situation in which they live, understanding the range of choices available to them, and helping to find ways to make better choices available to them.

Before judging a person, we must first understand what it is like to stand in their shoes. The "judge TV" shows all fail to do this, focusing instead on the cheap entertainment of public humiliation. Bloggers ought to understand this- we tend to publicly shame others too. Our behavior is rewarded by more people reading our blogs and leaving comments, which of course is the golden crown for bloggers. The more comments you get, the better a blogger you must be. It's no different than "judge TV" shows checking their Nielsen ratings.

L'affair de dopage

2006-11-21T09:52:00.000-06:00

My long-term passion has been bicycling. I started riding a bike about forty years ago at the age of seven, a red "convertible" bike with a removable top tube (so it could be either a "boy's" bike or a "girl's" bike) and solid rubber tires. I fell in love with being balanced on two wheels, with the wind in my face and the self reliance of providing one's own locomotive power. When I was a teenager, I got interested in cycling as a means for exploring my world, getting fit and got interested in bike racing.

I didn't actually start racing until 1992 at the age of 32. I wanted to care as a teenager in the suburbs of Chicago, but bike racing was a secretive hidden sport in those days. There were races all over the place, but no way to find out about them. There was a national organization, the ABLA, but I had no way to find out how to contact them. This was before the days of the Internets and the Google. After Greg Lemond came close to winning the Tour de France in 1985 and actually won it in 1986, and then was dramatically shot and almost died only to come back and win it again in 1989 and 1990, bike racing became much more visible in the US. Gone were the days of finding out who won the Tour in the fine print in a bottom corner of the sports page.

I raced bikes from 1992 through 2000, first with the Gopher Wheelmen and then with Lanterne Rouge. I was terrible. I rarely placed in the top ten of a race with more than twelve entrants. The only race I won was a state championship time trial- when I was the only person entered in my category! Eventually I stopped racing when the training aspect just stopped being fun and became drudgery. Team politics were a factor and pulled Lanterne Rouge apart, and that took a lot of the fun out of it for me too.

I still pay attention to bike racing, though, and follow the races through the www.cyclingnews.com Web site. Professional bike racing has always been a shady deal. It was a sport created by newspapers to sell newspapers. Side-of-the-road deals bargaining this win for that win or outright paying the opposition to lose was common. Background characters known as "soigneurs ("carers" in French) provided massage, prepared meals, provided training tips, offered counseling and quietly handed out mysterious substances to put fire in your legs and made you go faster.

Life gets more sophisticated as time goes on, and while soigneurs still provide massage and counsel, team doctors take care of the mysterious substances. Every team and every rider protests innocence, yet every team and every rider believes that those mysterious substances are necessary to win because "the other guys may be doped up." Average speeds in brutal events like the Tour de France have soared and get faster every year.

EPO. Aranesp. Pot Belge. IGF. Blood doping. Etc. It's an alphabet soup of doping, the seamy black underbelly of professional sports. There are doping products to help you run faster, jump higher, lift more weight, last longer, improve your short game, feel happier, have better erections, hurt less, eat less. It's not just professional sports. Average people dope their way through the day every bit as much as pro athletes do. Drugs treat medical conditions and save lives, but they can also provide a false life of fake happiness.

So I don't judge Floyd Landis- who may or may not be guilty- all that harshly. If he did dope, he's just a product of the modern world in which most of us dope. Pro cycling has decided to air its dirty laundry in public and has suffered a tarnished image as a result. Famous and anonymous riders dope, some get caught and some don't- the latter is as much a part of the team doctor's job as providing those injections, pills, potions and powders in the first place. The teams whose riders never get caught have better doctors.

There is a startling hypocrisy in the war of drugs- not only the war on recreational drugs but also the war on performance enhancement. A look at my e-mail inbox tells me there's quite a market among the general population for performance enhancement. Why should we expect athletes to be any different? The war on performance enhancement in professional sports is unwinnable from the regulatory perspective. The cheaters are always ahead, the regulators are always playing catch-up. That's just as true at the Olympics or the Tour de France as it is on Wall Street or on K Street.

The real place for doping to be fought is in teaching our young people ethics. Not morals- morals are paradoxically too changeable as they are based on religious principles which are trendy and change rapidly despite the claims of religions to be based on eternal values. Ethics is based on logic, and logic as a framework for rational thought does not change. The temporal world is not eternal, by definition, and morals can't keep up. Morals are brittle and easily shattered by the world's vicissitudes. We need to teach our children how to think for themselves, how to make ethical decisions and how to follow through on them.

Sports can be a great classroom for this learning. In the Floyd Landis case, as also with the cases of Tyler Hamilton, David Millar, Marco Pantani, Johann Museeuw, Frank Vandenbrook, Richard Virenque, etc., we find great material for learning about ethics and taking responsibility for one's actions. Few of the pro bike racers who have been caught doping have taken responsibility for their choices. They protest their innocence, blame others, shift the focus. They vilify whistle blowers like Paul Kimmage. Tomorrow Jesper Skibby's book will come out, in which he reportedly will confess his years of doping as a professional cyclist. Hopefully he can serve as a compass point in the direction of ethical conduct.

Wobbling towards WWIII

2006-11-17T11:49:00.000-06:00

I was born in 1959 and throughout my days in elementary school obliteration at the business end of a Russian ICBM was a constant background threat. The vision of WWIII was one of mutually assured destruction, a cataclysmic end of the world in which survival would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Then the Soviet system collapsed under its own weight. Low productivity combined with excessive military spending left the Soviet Union without an adequate foundation, making it vulnerable to a few nudges that toppled it: Solidarność, Afghanistan and ideological challenges from the West. While the threat of worldwide nuclear devastation was not completely abated, it was diminished. It may merely be in abeyance, awaiting the reawakening of Russian power on the world stage. Time will tell.

In the nearer term, a different threat to world peace has emerged. Called "Islamofascism" by a miscomprehending conservative American government, forces in the Middle East have collided both internally and with the West and the pressure is rising. A shrill sort of nationalism has developed, although rather than a nationalism about political entities it is a nationalism about Islam. This nationalism remains internally divided due to longstanding rivalries between Islamic sects, but may unite in its hatred of the West and most particularly the United States.

The conservative government of the United States cannot understand how anyone in the world can see the US as "the bad guy." George W. Bush has admitted this in public. This sort of political scotoma imperils world peace because in order to understand your enemy, you have to understand how your enemy sees you.

From their public statements, many Islamic leaders see the United States as "the great Satan," as the source of moral corruption in the world through its materialism and lopsided wealth, its exploitation of poorer and weaker countries to gain wealth, its support for brutal dictators (including, let us not forget, Saddam Hussein) for political and economic gain, and its malleable morality that tries to serve Mammon and God simultaneously. The criticisms are correct even while presenting a very distorted picture of the US. The counterbalances of American generosity with our money and our lives is overlooked in the effort to demonize us. Like most nationalistic efforts, the goal is to unite a fractious collection of groups against a common enemy.

There is precendent- and disturbing precedent- for this process. In 1930s and 1940s, a strident anti-American nationalism took hold in Japan. Japan felt its national identity slipping away, saw the creeping Americanization of its culture and reacted to it. This allowed some elements of Japanese society to push an anti-American agenda that led ultimately to the Pacific War, beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ending with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The same trends are occurring in the Middle East, in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Syria and other places. The saving grace at this time is that these countries are economically handicapped by a lack of efficient industrialization, which prevents the mass production of war materiel. These countries are internally divided by religious factionalism which prevents unity of purpose. And finally these countries are poor, relatively speaking. If those factors change, the West is in grave trouble.

The Bush Administration has pushed for regime change, toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein and the Baath party in Iraq. In neither case has a stable effective government been built, and both nations remain in chaos and at risk for falling into the control of extremist groups that bitterly hate the West and the US. With stunning arrogance and incompetence, the Bush Administration has merely made bad situations into horrible situation- costing perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives in the process and quite possibly setting the stage for WWIII. The world is reaping the bitter harvest of George W. Bush's lies.

I grew up in a functioning democracy. I believe in freedom and participatory government. And as such I believe that the Middle East would be better off with democractic governments. Some Middle Eastern countries have taken steps towards democracy over the past century. Imposing democracy from without by force, however, is simply impossible and it was delusional to think that it could be done in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Democracy must rise from within.

It is difficult to see a good way out of the quagmire. It is not enough to battle malaria by killing individual mosquitoes, which is what the Bush Admnistration has tried to do. The festering swamps that breed the mosquitoes have to be drained, and this is what has been avoided. The main swamp, the source of the contagion, is the Israel-Palestine problem. Decades of bad policy by Israel, terrorism by Palestinians and blatant prejudice by the West (especially the US) have gotten us where we are today. The Israel-Palestine problem must be settled permanently and equitably. Without that, the would will continue to slouch towards Armageddon.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats

What a difference a day makes

2006-11-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

My wife and I spent Tuesday evening with friends watching the election returns. These particular friends are Democrats, and previous election night parties with them had been, well, rather somber. The mood was downright jubilant watching the House returns gubernatorial races, and tense but hopeful watching the Senate races. The House is back in the hands of Democrats, the Senate looks to be back in the hands of Democrats, and the majority of governors are Democrats for the first time since 1994. State legislatures around the country- including Minnesota's- have swung into the Democrat column.

In all of this there is a note of caution. The Republicans saw 1994 and 2004, in particular, as evidence that the country had permanently swung to the right. Karl Rove's political strategy is founded on his belief in a natural conservative majority that will be permanent, and that liberals can basically be kicked to the curb and ignored. The problem with that strategy- as shown Tuesday night- is that the country does not have a natural conservative majority. It has a natural centrist majority. When the party in power gets out of hand, it gets chastised and its chain gets yanked. It's happened to the Democrats and it's happened to the Republicans.

In my opinion, this is the wisdom of the electorate in action. Now, I'm way to the left. You could call me an extremist liberal and I wouldn't disagree. I'm so far to the left that on some issues I end up standing next to the people on the right. Would America be a better place if everyone would just listen to me? Sure. You bet.

Not.

Extremists serve as a sort of conscience to the political process, but our likelihood of creating good policy is shaky. The view from the center is bound to be more balanced and show how to meet the needs of more people than the view from over here.

It would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to read the outcome of this election as a swing to the left by the voters. The electorate remains centrist, and just pulled in the Republican Party after it got too far afield and showed no signs of coming back. Well, except for the 6th District of Minnesota, which sent the most extreme wacko right wing nutjob in Minnesota politics to Washington DC. Oops.

Who to vote for?

2006-11-05T17:49:00.000-06:00

Who do I intend to vote for on November 7?

Governor: Ken Pentel. I don't think that Tim Pawlenty has been a good governor and has a tendency to be veracity-challenged. I don't think that Mike Hatch has the temperament to be a good leader in the Governor's Office. Both Pawlenty and Hatch has put their childish, petty sides on display in the past few days, which has just underscored my dictaste for both of them. Peter Hutchinson just hasn't inspired me but is probably better qualified than either Hatch or Pawlenty.

Senate: Amy Klobuchar. Mark Kennedy has shown himself to be a nasty piece of work too many times.

House: Betty McCollum. Does she even have opposition?

The rest of the ballot: I will for the first time be voting an almost one-party ballot. My distaste for the Republican Party, which began with Ronald Reagan and was intensified with Newt Gingrich, has risen to the level of outrage with Bush and Company. As massive a counterbalance as possible must be created, in my opinion.

Transportation Amendment: I'll be voting no. The reason that roads and transit have been underfunded is the incompetence of the Minnesota Legislature and Governor. I see no reason to let them off the hook. Reducing the fiscal flexibility and accountability of government is a bad idea at all times.

What is politics coming to?

2006-11-01T18:10:00.000-06:00

A couple of days ago I heard part of the debate between incumbent Representative Gil Gutknecht (R- MN 1st District) and challenger Tim Walz. Jaded as I am by the constant barrage of negative ads from Michelle Bachman, Patty Wetterling, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Hatch and the state and local Republican and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees, I was really taken aback by what I heard between Gutknecht and Walz.

Civility. Issues.

Is this any way to run a political campaign?

The Martial Chronicles

2006-10-29T00:26:00.000-05:00

President Bush, on October 17, 2006, signed into law Public Law 109-364, also known as the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007." As is usually the case with laws these days, it is a massive bill covering thousands of provisions. It's really rather amazing to consider these laws as compared to the pithy, sensible language used by the framers of the Constitution.

Of note in this newly minted law is Section 333. This section gives the President the power to more easily declare martial law, to impose the U.S. military on states, territories and municipalities and to seize control of state National Guard troops without the consent of the governors of said states. The conditions for this arrogation of powers include "a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States (italics mine) that the President solely determines is necessary. There is no system of check and balance here.

Let's see, what event is coming up with consequences that the President might consider it necessary to declare martial law and take control of the country through military means?

It's nice to see that the Republican Party is not letting pesky things like campaigning for re-election get in the way of their self-appointed task of keeping us safe from democracy.

Something that surprised me

2006-10-23T19:35:00.000-05:00

The following is not a judgment of either the pro-life or pro-choice side of the discussion, simply passing on a fact that I found surprising.

I recently came across research published by the American Academy of Family Physicians which found that 31% of pregnancies abort spontaneously. It appears that many women become pregnant and miscarry without ever knowing. According to the National Institute of Health, it is estimated that up to 50% of fertilized eggs spontaneously abort, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant.

Nationwide about 22% of pregnancies are terminated by medical abortion. The lowest incidence is in Utah, with 7%, and the highest in the District of Columbia at 50%. (Figures are from the Alan Guttmacher Institute for 2001, which is apparently considered a pro-pro-choice organization but whose estimates are accepted by both pro-life and pro-choice organizations; other sources indicate that the abortion rate has dropped somewhat over the past few years).

So, nature is one and a half times more likely to cause termination of a pregnancy than medical abortion. That's using the AAFP estimate; nature is much more than twice as likely to cause abortion according to the NIH estimate. I was very surprised by that, although I don't know why I should have been. The development of a human being from a zygote is an incredibly complex process, so complex that it would be truly miraculous if it never went wrong. According to the National Institute of Health, the usual cause of spontaneous abortion is fetal death. This in turn is usually caused by chromosomal or developmental abnormalities. There are other known causes including health problems for the mother, immunological factors, etc.

I don't know how or if these facts should weigh into the abortion debate. In general it seems like facts have no place in the discussion about medical abortion- the debate is about emotions and values. It's an insoluble debate and will never be settled, since both sides believe they are right and there is therefore no ground for compromise.

On being a liberal

2006-10-21T11:46:00.000-05:00

It's hard being a liberal these days. You'd think it would be easy, being surrounded by the failures of extremist conservative policies and the personal failures of those who would purport to soar with the angels. The holier-than-thou visage of the Republican Party has been rather besmirched by scandal after scandal of late.

And therein lies the problem. It's easy for a liberal to look at the mess that is conservatism in America and be smug. The Abramoff scandal, the Ney scandal, the DeLay scandal, the Foley scandal, the Gibbons scandal, the Nguyen scandal, the Weldon scandal... plenty of Republicans and their friends are facing criminal investigation for abuses of power, fraud and the like. It's easy to look at the many failed initiatives of the Bush Administration and to be smug. It's easy to look at the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and be smug. It's easy to look at the rank incompetence revealed by Hurricane Katrina and be smug. Being smug is not good. The old saying is that "pride goeth before the fall." But really it's not pride that precedes the banana peel- it's smugness.

I think it's been pretty clear in my political comments that I am angry. I am angry at George W. Bush, whose obvious cluelessness is appalling, and at Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, whose cynicism allows them to sell government to the highest bidder without a qualm of conscience. I am angry at Colin Powell for being a shill for something he knew was wrong. I am angry at Donald Rumsfeld for being delusional. I am angry at evangelicals for being myopic and easily manipulated into voting for these criminally incompetent Republicans, putting them into and keeping them in power. I am angry that people are so gullible as to fall repeatedly for the pro-family-values rhetoric and to ignore the actions of the Republican Party.

The measure of a person is not what he or she says- it is what he or she does. When we look at the Republican Party, we see that it has tuned its back on personal freedom, on morality in its own conduct, on a land of opportunity. Instead it has tried to serve two masters- the Almighty Dollar and the Almighty Father, in that order. The first is its real agenda, the second is its public agenda. The Republicans have worked to ensure the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an (conservative) aristocracy, and to exploit the religious fervor of evangelicals and other people of strong faith. They've been enormously successful, but as the saying goes "time wounds all heels."

The emperor is walking around stark naked, and yet a huge slice of America still pretends this is not the case. Twenty-six years ago, Ronald Reagan declared the fundamental neoconservative manifesto: that government is by definition incompetent and ought to be eliminated as much as possible. Now we are reaping the consequences of that damaged point of view. We have a government that is incompetent.

But here's the rub: what would the Democrats do? Thus far, the Democrats have basically campaigned on the notion that they are not the Republicans. It's a good point, but it's also self-damning with faint praise. The Democrats have not offered a credible, thoughtful alternative agenda to the morally bankrupt agenda of neoconservatism. It's possible that the Democrats may win the House and the Senate due to anti-Republican sentiment, but that is a slim hope to be banking on. The Democrats should have- and haven't- articulated a positive, forward thinking alternative agenda. Instead they have chosen the cowardly route.

That's why it's hard to be a liberal. All of the criticisms against the Democratic Party in 1994 still stand. The problems have not been corrected and a coherent, workable alternative vision has not been offered. I think that the Democrats will pay for this on election day and will be in for a rude shock when they do not win back control of Congress.

Plan B

2006-10-16T21:43:00.000-05:00

Recent news articles have pointed out that President Bush and his advisor, Mr. Rove, have been "inexplicably upbeat" regarding the upcoming election and seem to have no fear that the Democrats will win control of Congress. This seems to fly in the face of many of the polls. Perhaps the reason for the seemingly misplaced confidence is that Bush and Rove expect that vote tallies and the exit polls will again show the interesting mismatch seen in the 2004 election. Exit polls- historically very accurate and yet startlingly wrong in 2004- clearly showed Kerry winning the Presidency rather than Bush.

Perhaps Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are simply confident that the vote will go their way. Or perhaps they know something the rest of us don't about how our votes will be counted, since the electronic voting machines that will be used in many precincts across the country are (1) manufactured by a company that openly supports the Republican Party and (2) lack effective security and (3) in many cases lack any way to check whether the votes recorded match the votes cast.

Stay tuned. This election may have more action than an Irish cemetery in Chicago on election night.

S'Wonderful

2006-10-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

There's an upside to the Abramoff corruption scandal, and not even a partisan one. The revelations of the scandal, as it unfolds, demonstrates a couple of key facts. First, as someone in Congress pointed out early in the scandal, you can't have a corrupt lobbyist without a corrupt Congressperson. Corrupt lobbyists leave a paper trail of one sort or another, and that trail leads to the door of the corrupt members of Congress. This, in turn, allows the public to hold its elected representatives accountable. This is the benefit of the Abramoff scandal, and it is a nonpartisan one because increased accountability and transparency in government protects the populace from both parties.

This particular scandal has been a Republican one, thanks to the rabid partisan leanings of Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed on the lobbying side and Tom DeLay on the congressional side. In addition to the scandal in the relationship between Abramoff's organization and Congress, Abramoff also had hundreds of contacts with White House personnel. The import of those contacts is not yet clear.

Norquist and Reed, in particular, have repeatedly and publicly stated that their goal is to create a permanent conservative monopoly on political power in the United States. Karl Rove has also publicly avowed the same goal. The strategy to achieve this has been focused on motivating the socially conservative base to political action by keeping key wedge issues at the forefront, such as abortion, gay marriage, etc. There are two benefits to this: one is to keep the Republican Party in power; the other is to keep the socially conservative base unaware that they are being played. The real control of the Republican Party is in the hands of the economic elite, whose goal is to create a permanent power base to protect their personal fortunes.

It didn't work for British and French aristocrats. It would be foolish to think the same thing couldn't happen again.

There aren't enough of the elite to do this on their own, so they have had to co-opt the social conservative- largely evangelical- segment of the population. Thus the Republican Party serves two masters. Some of the evangelical community have been waking up to this fact and are calling attention to it- such as in the "green evangelical" movement and the book written by a White House insider claiming that key Bush Administration figures "mocked" Christian leaders while exploiting them for votes (one wonders what those officials say in private about the President). They are being vociferously denounced by other evangelicals, but there are hints that a groundswell is happening on the right that bodes interesting times for the Republican Party.

A permanent grip- by any party- on political power in the U.S. is anti-democratic. We have seen the consequences of unfettered Republican rule over the past six years, resulting in spiraling national debt, huge annual deficit spending, an ill-conceived and incompetently managed war, inept national security that crosses the line into malfeasance, the erosion of civil rights for all citizens and especially for certain groups, etc. Ronald Reagan swept into power in 19800 complaining about the Democrats having done the same things!

We currently have a Presidency that hides behind the thickest shield of secrecy in my lifetime, which always makes me wonder what it is they don't want me to know about.

Democracy is "the government of the people, by the people, for the people" in the words of the great Republican President Abraham Lincoln. A permanent power base takes that power out of the hands of the people and places it into the hands of the power brokers.

democracy |diˈmäkrəsē| noun ( pl. -cies)

• a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives

• control of an organization or group by the majority of its members

• the practice or principles of social equality : demands for greater democracy.

ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French démocratie, via late Latin from Greek dēmokratia, from dēmos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule.’

The recent scandals and revelations about our government (Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, Curt Weldon, etc) and about the people running major corporations such as United Health offer us a remarkable opportunity for self-examination. Is American the fine nation it thinks it is? Are we ethical and moral in how we conduct our politics, our businesses, our private lives? Do we deflect sober reflection about ourselves by pointing at the failings of others?

We have lost sight of our values in the rush to grab power and riches. We enrich ourselves at the cost of the billions of people who live onless than three dollars a day. We exploit the workers of other nations, who do not have protective labor laws, in order to buy cheap electronics and clothing. Those who can afford to flee bad neighborhoods instead of working to improve the quality of life for all. We allow the murder and torture of tens of thousands to keep cheap oil flowing into our gas tanks. We destroy the world that our children and grandchildren must live in for the rest of their lives, in order to pad our own pockets now.

We have been warned. The sins of the fathers will be visited upon their children. You'd think that'd be enough to make us change our ways.

Club membership

2006-10-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

Today North Korea has claimed a successful test of a nuclear weapon. Unrepentant in the face of international condemnation, North Korea's government appears very proud of its success. Independent confirmation has not occurred, but seismic data did indicate an "event" on the Korean peninsula. This is apparently North Korea's first successful test detonation with an estimated explosive power ranging from 550 tons up to 15 kilotons. The size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, just to put that into perspective. World leaders have rushed to condemn North Korea's test. President Bush, with no apparent sense of irony, stated that North Korea has defied the will of the international community.

No one should be surprised by North Korea's action. Having nuclear weapons makes a nation a force to be reckoned with and guarantees a place at the table. Having nukes means no other country can afford to overlook you. It also means no one will dare invade you, which is a rather more important issue for North Korea which remains in a deadlock with South Korea over a very tense border. The Korean War has never ended.

Eight nations are known to have successfully detonated nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and the People's Republic of China; all are signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Three nations that have not signed onto that accord have also successfully detonated nuclear weapons: Pakistan, India and North Korea. Israel is believed to have up to 200 nuclear weapons but this has never been officially confirmed or denied. Only one nation has produced and then voluntarily eliminated its nuclear arsenal: South Africa. Three former soviet Bloc states- Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine- had returned their nuclear weapons to Russia by 1996.

Nations feel a need to be safe, just as individuals do. Homeowners buy handguns, nations develop nukes. The aggressive actions of the United States against Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 and Iraq in the wake of Donald Rumsfeld's obsession have been quite likely to cause concern among the other two "axis of evil" nations- Iran and North Korea. Both nations have ramped up their nuclear development programs- Iran's hidden under the undoubted lie that the goal is for civilian electricity generation, and North Korea's openly militant path to nuclear weapons. It is likely that the open threats from the Bush Administration have ramped up the efforts of Iran and North Korea to put themselves beyond the risk of military invasion.

There are consequences to every action. Today the world has reaped another fruit of the Bush Administration's ill-chosen path in the world: the nuclear arms race has resumed.

Grace

2006-10-06T19:34:00.000-05:00

Sometimes horrible crimes are committed. After those crimes happen, the search for justice begins. The perpetrator is sought, often arrested and then brought to trial. In some cases, in some states or in Federal trials, the death penalty is a possibility in the case of particularly heinous crimes.

In many of those capital cases, one can see protesters outside of the court demonstrating in support of the death penalty. The state-sanctioned murder of the perpetrator is seen as just by these supporters. But killing another human being does not bring peace or healing. It is revenge and nothing more. As Gandhi noted, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." While I oppose the death penalty under any conditions, that's not the point of this entry.

This week, many people were horrified by the shootings of several young Amish girls by Charles Carl Roberts at a school near Nickel Mines PA. The heroism of these girls is stunning. 13 year old Marian Fisher pleaded with Roberts to shoot her and to let the other girls go, in an effort to try to protect the other girls. Her sister, 11 year old Barbie Fisher, appealed to be shot second. Marian Fisher died along with four other girls; Barbie Fisher survived with injuries to her should, hand and leg; four other girls have survived thus far. Barbie attended her sister's funeral today before going back to the hospital.

Charles Carl Roberts killed himself, sparing the community of having to prosecute him. He left behind a wife and children. If there had been a trial, he could have been sentenced to death under Pennsylvania law. Due to the heinous nature of the crime, I have no doubt that protesters would have turned up, demanding the ultimate punishment. Many of those supporting the death penalty would identify themselves as conservative Christians. The death penalty is supported by the National Assembly of Evangelicals, along with the Christian Coalition, Christian Reconstructionists, Southern Baptist Convention and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church. All these groups tend to be conservative. Moderate to liberal Christian groups tend to oppose the death penalty. There are, of course, exceptions in both directions. Among other faiths, Islam allows the death penalty but has a strong tradition of mercy; Jews tend to be split on the issue much as Christians are; Buddhists oppose the death penalty.

The Amish would be counted among the conservative Christians, indeed among the most conservative of Christians, but historically have strongly opposed the death penalty as have the Mennonites. But the Amish have done something astonishing in the midst of their grief. I cannot even write about it without being moved to tears.

The Amish community has forgiven Charles Carl Roberts. They have forgiven his wife and children, rightly holding them blameless in his actions. Mrs. Roberts was invited to attend one of the funerals if she wished, and has been invited to remain in the community. And Amish leaders have called for a fund to be set up to support Mrs. Roberts and her children.

Such forgiveness should shame and inspire the rest of Christendom. We can rise above our pain and our anger and our fear. We can find the common thread that binds us all together. We can find the freedom that forgiveness brings. The Amish have given us a shining bright example of humaneness, of compassion, of mercy and of wisdom.

That is true Right Livelihood.

Sometimes nothing needs to be added

2006-09-29T17:02:00.000-05:00

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.

Atomic world

2006-09-25T09:28:00.000-05:00

The Iranian attempt to develop nuclear power has been much in the headlines, with the explicit assumption that the goal of nuclear development is possessing nuclear weapons, not just having good civilian electricity service. Iran periodically denies intending to build nuclear weapons and periodically saber rattles, depending on what seem to serve its interests at any given time. Consistency in policy doesn't really seem to be a value for the Iranian government.

Now Egypt and Turkey are expressing interest in joining the Nuclear Club, with concomitant concerns about the nuclear weaponization of those countries. The rest of the Nuclear Club, led by the U.S., wants to prevent other countries from joining as much as possible. It is apparently not considered feasible to allow nations with a relatively impoverished quality of life to build nuclear energy facilities without assuming that they will also build nuclear weapons.

Maybe that's realistic. I don't know. But I do know why countries like Iran would want to have nuclear weapons. It guarantees their safety from George W. Bush. They have seen the United States invade two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq- the former for housing al Qaeda and the latter for thumbing its nose at U.N. sanctions. One of those nations was not a credible threat to U.S. security, the other- indirectly- was.

But there is a nation that is a credible threat and which is impervious to U.S. blandishments and threats: North Korea. Why is that? Because North Korea has nukes and their leader is crazy enough to possibly use them. As a result, North Korea is safe from the Bush Administration's cowboy tendencies (even though the President himself is from Connecticut). It's that safety that countries like Iran, Egypt and Turkey desire. They see their relative neighbors such as Pakistan, India and Israel with those weapons which create a zone of safety that cannot be had in any other way.

The Bush Administration needs to deal with North Korea effectively. Armed invasion is out of the question when the invadee has nukes and a lunatic running the country. Diplomacy is the tool to be used, a tool which the Bush Administration unfortunately doesn't know how to use effectively. The resulting paralysis is a strong motivator for countries like Iran, Turkey and Egypt to get the same protection for themselves.

Start where you are

2006-09-23T22:56:00.000-05:00

Psychotherapy is fundamentally a process of learning. We have to learn about ourselves and our current situation, identify our desired situation, and map out a plan for obtaining the skills to help us achieve our goals. Without a realistic and accurate appraisal of who we are and what our situation is, we cannot proceed forward with any assurance of success. Just as an enduring home cannot be built on a poor foundation, we cannot make plans to improve ourselves based on an inaccurate perception of reality.

I think it's clear that the Bush Administration- and more broadly the Republican Party in general- has lost track of this simple fact. Instead of starting with reality, the Bush Administration starts with beliefs. Its actions are predicated on those beliefs, and it has a pattern of firing those people who point out inconvenient truths and replacing them with people who will espouse the beliefs. This has been evident to me, and to many others, from the very beginnings of the Administration immediately after the election in 2000.

For a couple of years, various pundits have been pointing out that the war in Iraq has served to increase terrorism both inside and outside Iraq. The invasion has become a major selling point in the recruitment efforts of terrorist groups. President Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have denied these claims- even calling the patriotism of those who point out these inconvenient truths into question. They forget the importance of the "loyal opposition," those people who act to hold those in power accountable.

The Bush Administration's newest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) points out the very thing that the President, Vice President and the Secretary of Defense have vociferously denied even in the past month: that the pundits are correct while the President and his Administration are not.

The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq. It is tragic that the majority did not oppose it before it started. Perhaps this horrible mess, which will have repercussions for decades to come, could have been avoided. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats can avoid their share of the responsibility. The Democrats abandoned their role as the loyal opposition, and Congress as a whole abdicated its Constitutional responsibility to provide oversight of the actions of the Administration. The people of the United States, even people like myself who have been opposed to the war at all times, share in the responsibility for this ghastly error. We- and the rest of the world- will share in the consequences. It's a small planet.

We see the same error on every front with the Republican Party and the Bush Administration. From the stance on the environment and global warming, to tax policy, to regulation of all kinds, the party in power has chosen to be guided by its beliefs rather than by the "governing facts" to use John Kenneth Galbraith's term. In each case, the obligation of the Democratic Party to be the countervailing force has not been met- I suspect due to the conflict of interests that results from the system of legalized bribery that constitutes campaign finance law.

The Bush Administration's grip on reality is tenuous at best. Their policies and initiatives remain at odds with the facts of the current situation in the world. They live in a world where the America of "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" is believed to have been real, and they believe that they can get back there. Because they have built their house on sand, the outcomes of their policies are as likely to be disastrous as beneficial. Perhaps the recent NIE will be the whack upside the head that starts to bring them to their senses.

War- what is it good for?

2006-09-23T13:37:00.000-05:00

"Absolutely nothing" is the famous refrain. But it's not true. War can be good for profits- companies that service the war industry, for example.

"There was never a good war or a bad peace.” -Benjamin Franklin.

I spent some time yesterday speaking with a woman whose family is from Iraq. I mentioned in an earlier entry the murder and robbery of her uncle at the hands of American soldiers. Yesterday she estimated that the war in Iraq has killed 120 members of her family. One family losing 120 people in a war opportunistically engineered by a political party that claims to be for "family values."

This is not a war over faith. As English politician Tony Benn succinctly stated:

“A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.”

He's right. On all sides of this conflict are people killing for a doctrine, perhaps convinced that they are dying for their faith but in fact violating and defacing the very faith they profess. That includes faith in democracy as well as in religion.

Benn also coined the famous phrase “All war represents a failure of diplomacy." The Bush Adminstration, famous for its lack of patience or tact, has little interest in or skill at diplomacy. They understand carrying the big stick, but not walking softly. While Hugo Chavez appears to be something of a nutter, he was right in his criticism that George W. Bush acts as if he owns the world. It is a matter of Bush's doctrinal attitude, which is that he knows what's right and the rest of the world would be better off if they do it his way.

Now, that's what the conservatives claim that the liberals do. Here we see the paradox of the right wing U.S. conservative movement: utterly convinced of its rightness and utterly lacking in self-examination, it tries to force everyone else to live its way. The irony is that this is exactly what the conservatives complain about other people doing.

H. L. Mencken wrote “If you want peace, work for justice.” President Eisenhower stated "peace and justice are two sides of the same coin." There is deep wisdom in this, wisdom that we would do well to understand. Developing that wisdom must start with understanding the difference between justice and revenge, something that is easily lost.

The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh recently sent a hand written letter to President Bush inviting the President to think differently about the war in Iraq. He reminded the President that those being killed are our brothers, something we know from our faith and also on an intuitive level. Our anger blinds us to our brotherhood with each other, and that allows us to do horrible things like killing 120 members of a single family. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us gently that all of us share a common nature and that our actions towards one another should be based on that commonality.

There could be no war if we did that.

Making sure your vote is counted

2006-09-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

Lou Dobbs has taken on an issue largely dodged by the general mass media: whether your vote will count. After the massive voting irregularities across the country in the 2004 election, irregularities that appear to have tipped the presidency from a Kerry upset to a Bush squeaker, questions have arisen about whether hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of average Americans were disenfranchised. There is a powerful odor around American ballot boxes and election law.

One step that needs to be taken immediately is to bar the Secretaries of States of each of the U.S. states from being actively involved in campaigns other than their own re-elections. These are the people that certify the vote, and in two successive Presidential elections the choice of President-elect hinged on a single state- Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. In both cases, the Secretaries of State were also running the Bush campaigns in those states. In both cases, the respective Secretaries of State were partisans eager to advance in the Republican Party. In both cases, there were signs of massive and systematic voting fraud in favor of the Republican candidate. In both cases, George W. Bush won.

Conflict of interest is a serious issue in almost all professions. It is a critical issue in politics, and one that undermines both parties and insidiously undermines our democracy and our freedom far more than any "Islamofascist terrorist" could ever hope to do. The events of the past several years have scratched the surface of the depth of corruption in Congress and the Administration- the latter being so corrupt that it cannot even recognize its own corruption. Scanning the lists of political appointees who are basically getting patronage for their monetary support for the party is a clear indicator of this.

It is time for the American public to send a clear and unequivocal message to the thieves who would steal our freedom in the name of security. But in order to do so, we must first take steps to ensure that our votes are counted. We must require of every state that every vote is recorded on paper and protected so that it can be recounted if necessary. We must ensure that voting machines are safe from tampering- which, as Dodds and others have pointed out, it currently an all but hopeless mess. We must hold our electoral system to the highest standards, which it currently does not meet.

Two national elections in a row have been tainted by voting fraud and disenfranchisement. The post hoc data is that Al Gore really won in 2000, and John Kerry really won in 2004. In both cases, George W. Bush claimed the victory with disastrous consequences. Our freedom- and the fate of the world- rest upon getting our elections right, so that it is the American people who choose their leaders and not deceitful, lying thieves.

The world is an odd place

2006-09-18T18:44:00.000-05:00

Just days ago, the Pope aroused the anger of many Muslims by quoting an emperor who died 600 years ago. The basis of the anger was that the old emperor claimed that Islam was spread through violence. Many Muslims state that such claims are slander and that Islam is a religion of peace.

And, despite the furor over the Pope's words and the protests that Islam is a peaceful religion, yet another al Qaeda-linked group has chosen to undermine a billion other Muslims. According to reports by the Associated Press, the Mujahedeen Shura Council "said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as 'the worshipper of the cross' saying 'you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.'"

This is the paradox of Islam in the modern world. On the one hand, many Muslims say theirs is a religion of peace and on the other hand are hundreds of thousands of Jihadists proclaiming war on the West and Christendom. They are not alone in this- the other two Abrahamaic religions do the same things, just not as dramatically. In my opinion, the most corrosive and destabilizing forces in the world are Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Life imitates art

2006-09-13T20:46:00.000-05:00

According to the Associated Press, "Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.

Dozens of women are said to be taking part in what is being called the "strike of crossed legs", a move backed by the mayor of Pereira.

The city in Colombia's coffee-growing region reported 480 killings last year.

A city official said the idea came from a meeting of wives and girlfriends over the progress of a disarmament scheme."

This is very similar to Aristophanes's play "Lysistrata" in which the women of Sparta, Boeotia and Corinth get together and decide to withold sex from their husbands, in an effort to bring about the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Hmmm. Maybe the same approach could be used to bring about the end of the Iraq war.

White house of cards

2006-09-08T16:05:00.000-05:00

Yesterday President Bush announced that a number of secret prisoners in the "war" against terror (which he previously said didn't exist) will be transferred from secret prisons abroad (which he previously said didn't exist) to the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp (which his Administration has said they want to close as soon as possible).

Faced with free-falling support for the war in Iraq, the President has this week made speech after speech trying to link the war in Iraq with the war on terror. Americans still have some support for the latter "war" even though they now disapprove of the former. Bush and his team hope that if they can somehow link the two, support for the war in Iraq, public opinion about the war and especially about the President will rise. And of course this is all cynically timed to coincide with the 5th anniversary of the horrors of 9/11.

Unfortunately, as happens all too often for this President, reality has again reared its ugly head and contradicted Mr. Bush's rhetoric. This time it is the intelligence report released by the U.S. Senate today which finds (again) no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Gee, that's exactly the conclusion drawn by the 9/11 Commission and published a long time ago. But perhaps it's significant that this time the declaration comes from the CIA- part of the Executive Branch- rather than from a bipartisan panel that heard hundreds of hours of testimony.

Mr. Bush and his team are enduring- but not learning from- a painful lesson: time wounds all heels.

Invoking Godwin's Law

2006-09-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

Today President Bush compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler. In doing so he invoked Godwin's Law and committed what Leo Strauss termed "reductio ad Hitlerum." By equating bin Laden and Hitler, the President hopes to get Americans (the majority of whom no longer support the war in Iraq, and the vast majority of whom do not see him or his Administration as competent) to despise bin Laden like they despise Hitler. This is redundant, of course, because most Americans (and much of the world) already despise bin Laden.

The President and his administration are desperate to avoid comparisons between the war in Iraq (and the broader "war" on terror) and the war in Vietnam for obvious reasons. Vietnam was a defeat for America's military, and BushCo is terrified of being seen as losers. That's natural for anyone in power, but especially for a President who provoked a war under false pretenses, following the advice of incompetent advisors (and ignoring the advice of competent advisors).

But to what war would they want to compare the war in Iraq? Certainly not Korea, where the U.S. and its allies were fought to a stalemate by the Chinese-supported Communists. Probably not the Cold War, since that was a war of attrition that went on over decades and was won by the U.S. due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of their own quagmire in Afghanistan. The invasion of Grenada was not really a significant military victory. The Gulf War has been criticized by the President's advisors, so that rules that out.

No, the best hope for selling the war in Iraq is WWII. There are some handy parallels: Pearl Harbor and 9/11, for a start. But especially unlike Vietnam, unlike Korea, there is a single person with a name and a face who can be used to personify the war on terror and, by spurious extension, the war in Iraq: Osama bin Laden. The face of WWII was Adolph Hitler, and thus the equation today as part of the Bush Administration's marketing campaign for Rumsfeld's War. The parallels between bin Laden and Emperor Hirohito are much stronger- in that both are shadow figures to the West, capable of inspiring their followers to commit suicide as a means of killing the enemy- but Hitler carries a cachet of pure evil that Hirohito cannot match. It is for that reason that Bush invoked Godwin's Law today.

Let's get a few things straight, however. Osama bin Laden did not have a relationship with Saddam Hussein. bin Laden did have some contact with mid-level Iraqis in Hussein's government, but Hussein rebuffed bin Laden. That makes sense, as Hussein is a megalomaniac and wouldn't be much interested in letting someone like bin Laden operate within his country, setting up a civilian militia of religious extremists. The invasion of Afghanistan was a reprisal for 9/11, because the Taliban actively aided and abetted bin laden and al Qaeda; because of this, the international community including much of the Middle East supported or did not oppose the U.S. operation in Afghanistan.

On 9/11/01, Donald Rumsfeld stated in meetings with Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and other Cabinet officials that the terrible events of that would offer a pretext for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. This was before anyone knew for sure who was behind the attacks, mind you. But we must remember that Rumsfeld publicly came out in favor of a proactive strike against Iraq in 1997, and had been basically obsessed by Iraq during his time in the private sector after losing his job when George H. W. Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton. Rumsfeld thought that a rapid and decisive victory over Hussein would restore the tarnished reputation of the U.S. military and correct the "ragged ending" of the Gulf War. (I should mention here that I don't think Rumsfeld was wrong in his assessment that leaving Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War was a bad idea. It was a bad idea). Thus the path to war was chosen first, and after that choice came the search for a justification for war that would stick. None has been found, with the majority of Americans finally seeing through the smoke and mirrors show just a little bit.

But equating the war in Iraq and the "war" on terror with WWII falls apart under inspection. President Bush has proclaimed Rumsfeld's War as a "defining moment," forgetting that history decides what moments are defining moments. The "war" on terrorism and the war in Iraq cannot be equated as a war against evil on par with D Day and the liberation of Europe from the Nazi war machine. The true evil of the Nazis was not well known to Americans until after the liberation of the concentration camps. WWII was a war against evil in retrospect, not in inception. And WWII was a mostly traditional war which ended with the formal surrender of the Japanese and the near destruction of Germany.

The war on terror is not, in fact, a war. It is a police procedure. "War" sounds better in a sound bite, but the type of work that must be done to collect intelligence on terrorist groups is simply not suited to a military approach. It must be done through a police approach. The war in Iraq, conversely, is indeed a war with all its accoutrements- including the indiscriminate use of nuclear material by the U.S. in such quantities as have never been previously used, and which may have health consequences for Iraqis and U.S. service personnel for decades to come.

George W. Bush's attempts to equate the war in Iraq and the "war" on terror with WWII is grossly facile and self-serving. It is a Madison Avenue, wag-the-dog approach to self-justification. A just war, whatever that is, needs no exculpation. Of course, the funny thing is that if the war in Iraq can be compared to WWII, then George W. Bush is the modern FDR! The Republicans have been fighting for over 60 years to defeat FDR without much success, despite controlling all three branches of government. The New Deal- Social Security, the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, etc. are all standing legacies of FDR that the Republicans have been trying to get rid of ever since. What a hilarious comparison for the most right wing President of the past 100 years!

The haters of freedom

2006-08-31T15:40:00.000-05:00

Today President Bush went to bat against critics of his policies regarding his war in the Middle East. In doing so, the Decider put himself further into opposition with the majority of Americans, not to mention the majority of the rest of the world.

The gist of Mr. Bush's world view is that terrorists around the world are united in a common bond: stopping the progress of freedom.

Ummm. What? The President and his staff have made this claim time and time again in various guises, and yet have never managed to define what this means. He said again today that terrorists wan to impose a "totalitarian regime" on us. He identified these terrorists as "radicalized followers" of the Sunni and Shia forms of Islam such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. "Despite their differences, these groups form the outline of a single movement -- a worldwide network of radicals who use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology."

These sorts of speeches by the President make one wonder if (1) he knows how to use a dictionary and (2) whether he actually gets any information from the real world. Certainly there are Sunni and Shia terrorists, and certainly there are "radicalized" followers of these branches of Islam. But in general they want to impose an absence of government, to live by Islamic law rather than secular law. That's not totalitarianism- it is theocracy.

We have the same trend in the United States where radicalized Christianists try to intimidate or even murder people who work in or go to family planning clinics, who try to use local, state and federal government to create a de facto state religion. And yet the President cannot see these people for what they are- home grown terrorists in some cases. Probably because these people are Part of the President's "base" and an integral part of Karl Rove's hoped-for permanent conservative majority.

Mr. Bush is famous for his cognitive rigidity. He, and his staff, simply dismiss reality when it contradicts their faith-based notions. But the American people, who are generally pragmatists rather that idealogues, have begun to spot the fatal flaws in Bush's policies. Most of them are coming to the realization rather late, unfortunately, but at least they are getting there.

The biggest critic of the war is reality- it was a bad policy from it's inception at the Rumsfeld Institute in 1997, and it is a failing policy now. The nation of Iraq has been destroyed, its people have been maimed or killed by the tens of thousands, and the intended democracy has sputtered to a halt. The object lesson is that democracy cannot be imposed by external forces but must instead arise from within. The problem- for which I have no answer, in all honesty- is to chart a course that will work. I don't think that the Bush Administration has the talent, wisdom or judgment to create that plan.

Control factor

2006-08-30T14:40:00.000-05:00

"Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem." Ronald Reagan spoke those words on the campaign trail some 26 years ago. He was thinking mainly about taxes and government regulation of industry, as well as a goverment he saw as overly large, expensive and clumsy. The Republican Party's preoccupation with taxes and regulation continues, but the interest in developing a small and agile government has gone by the wayside- along with any notion of fiscal responsibility (as of 30 seconds ago, the national debt stood at $8,508,500,739,559.34 or $28,418.02 per American citizen- and the debt increases at an average of $1,720,000,000 per day).

Today's bad news involves the Environmental Protection Agency, the regulatory agency the Republicans really love to hate. All those damned tree huggers! The EPA employs about 18,000 people and has 10 regional offices and 17 laboratories. The EPA was established in 1970 by a law signed by Richard M. Nixon. He was a... Republican. Republican Presidents have signed a number of key environmental protection laws. Unfortunately the Republican Party has lost track of their fine heritage and of the fact that "conservation" comes from the same root word as "conservative." Conservatives should be leading the charge to protect the environment rather than destroying it.

The best way to control people is to control how they see the world. The best way to do that is to control the information they have access to. That's why the pro-life movement has worked hard to convince states that women have a "right to know" what an abortion is and that women considering an abortion should be presented with a pamphlet containing biased and scientifically inaccurate "facts." That's why the religious extremists have pushed so hard to have "intelligent design" included in school curricula for science classes, despite there being no actual scientific content within "intelligent design." That's why we once had equal-time requirements for broadcasters. That's why the Republican Party has a central access point for elected and appointed officials to consult for "talking points" that are designed to serve their masters.

The Bush Administration is continuing its war on reality, this time by eliminating access to data gathered and held by the EPA research libraries. Tens of thousands of documents have been boxed up and put away, never to see the light of day again during the Bush Years. The move is being done under the guise of budget cutting, with 15 of the EPA's 26 libraries being closed by the end of September. But the real reason is that this move will severely hamper the prosecution of polluters under the law by making facts- the foundation of any competent prosecution- harder to come by. If you want to know who benefits, follow the money.

The wages of greed

2006-08-29T19:54:00.000-05:00

America is the richest country in the world. It might not be the richest per capita (places like the United Arab Emirates and Monaco spring to mind as possibly having higher per capita wealth than the U.S.) nor have the highest average incomes (Luxembourg wins that spot, according to the CIA Factbook). But in terms of the sheer wealth within the borders of one country, the U.S. wins.

In that light, it is astonishing that one of every eight Americans (12.6%) lived at least part of 2005 in poverty, and one out of four African Americans. Nearly 16% of the U.S. population- almost 47 million people- has no health insurance.

Why don't the poor have more money? Is there really not enough money to go around? Maybe it's as simple as this: a lot of poor people don't have enough money because a few rich people have way more than they need. Maybe it is the greed of a few that results in the suffering of many. Maybe it is just as simple as that.

Median income in the U.S for 2005 was $46,326, up a paltry 1.1% over 2004 (and the first increase since 1999). By comparison, median income for CEOs in 2005 jumped 25% to $17,900,000. Workers saw an average 3.1% increase in wages in 2005, most of which was swallowed up by inflation. Many CEOs even have their taxes paid reimbursed by the company, but they don't seem to be offering to pay the income taxes of the people whose work actually creates the profit.

Gee, where did the money go? Why are millions of Americans in poverty? Because the system is being milked for all its worth at the top. The social elite are rich and powerful, and have biased laws and policies to ensure that they remain rich and powerful. Its' what they do all day long, while almost everyone else is just scraping through the day as best they can.

The greedy don't play well with others. And many of those others suffer as a result.

What he said!

2006-08-16T12:26:00.000-05:00

Dobbs is at it again. If you're under 75, be very afraid for your future as an American.

A rising tide...

2006-08-15T15:12:00.000-05:00

There's an old saying that "a rising tide floats all boats." If you lived on the Gulf Coast during last year's hurricane season, you might have a different opinion of tides- especially the rip-roaring one caused by Katrina.

Amidst the billions of dollars of damage, amidst the struggle to rebuild, there is another struggle: that of getting insurance companies to pay for the damage. Most insurance companies are fighting tooth and nail to avoid the tens of billions of dollars in liabilities caused by Katrina. There are many lawsuits that have been and will be filed- including lawsuits by Republican Senator Trent Lott, Democratic Representative Gene Taylor, and U.S. District Court Judge Louis Guirola. Personally I think it takes some cheek for an insurance company to bail out on paying when the customers involved are some of the most powerful people in the U.S.!

All of the Katrina lawsuits will apparently be tried in from of U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter, as Judge Guirola has recused himself from all similar cases, citing his own participation in such a suit. Thus far, Judge Senter has sided with the insurance companies Allstate and State Farm, upholding the homeowner's insurance policy language that excludes flood damage. Judge Guirola is suing Nationwide Insurance, but his case has not yet come to trial- in front of his co-worker.

I imagine all these folks make a pretty good living, and most people in Congress and on the bench had a pretty good income before that. I suspect these three families will be OK. But what about the tens of thousands of families who can't afford lawyers, who can't afford to sue, who were often working for minimum wage (which is at the lowest purchasing power it has had for nearly 50 years)? These families are still paying mortgages for houses that no longer exist! They might literally get a couple thousand dollars from their insurance companies, which cannot rebuild a home.

And who will benefit from this Scroogeness? It's always instructive to follow the money. Here's what I think will happen. Most middle income and lower families from the Gulf Coast will end up declaring bankruptcy, or simply stop paying their mortgages on their rubble-filled lots. The properties will revert to the banks and other lenders, who will then sell at top dollar to developers. The developers in turn will build new subdivisions, luxury hotels, floating casinos, tourist destinations. So the beneficiaries of Katrina will be, as always, those who have the money to begin with. That's called the Golden Rule: those who have the gold make the rules.

I should just say what I mean

2006-08-11T22:40:00.000-05:00

Well, yesterday I wrote about the President being "at war with Islamic fascism." I sighed when I heard him say that, because I knew he was going to insult Muslims all over the world. And he did. What a surprise. W's foot spends so much time in his mouth that he's at risk for developing athlete's tongue. I didn't bother to talk about it because (1) it was so bloody obvious and (2) I get tired of thinking about the President's verbal shortcomings.

I keep thinking that the President of the United States can't be such a clod. I keep being proven wrong. I thought that maybe it just me being a liberal and having a jaundiced view of our Commander-in-Thief. But, dang it, he is a clod and a general embarrassment to Americans. This is just one more example. Instead of building bridges to the moderate and liberal Islamic world (the vast majority of Muslims), President Bush has managed to drive further wedges between the U.S. and Islam. And that cannot be good. It is too easy to cross the line from being a clod to being dangerous.

At war with Islamic fascists

2006-08-10T18:01:00.000-05:00

"This nation is at war with Islamic fascists" was the statement by President Bush today, in response to the British police's successful intervention in a plot to blow up aircraft bound from the UK to the US. The accused terrorists reportedly planned on using liquid explosives in beverage containers, detonated with a cell phone or MP3 player.

While this is very good news and will probably boost public opinion regarding anti-terrorism efforts, it also underscores a problem with those efforts. The Bush Administration has repeatedly stated that the US is "at war" with various things- terrorism, al Qaeda, and now "islamic fascism." War is a military procedure by definition, but it is clearly not the military that can or will be the front line protection against terrorism. Wars are waged on countries. The military is a blunt force applied to large targets, like cities. Militaries destroy lots of people and infrastructure.

The police are more like a surgical procedure than a blunt force trauma. Terrorists can hide anywhere. Terrorists could be hiding on your block in your town. Do you want the military applying their blunt force approach in your neighborhood? Would it be better to have your home destroyed by the Army than by terrorists?

A "war" on terrorism is the wrong idea. Terrorism is too diffuse, too mobile, for military tactics. The appropriate approach is one of utilizing civilian forces- the police, intelligence agencies, etc. The recent success in Britain is an example of this. The US should avoid using the word "war" so lightly, because doing so dilutes the meaning of "war." War is a term that should be used judiciously.

Starting off from the wrong idea- that a "war on terrorism" is even possible- increases the risk of failure. It is crucial the the correct thinking be applied to the situation, and that the appropriate resources are made available to the appropriate agencies. "The war of terror" is a great sound bite, but it's not effective policy. The Bush Administration has not understood this from the very beginning, as was shown clearly by the 9/11 Report.

Professionals versus bloggers

2006-08-09T20:06:00.000-05:00

There's a difference between professional journalists and bloggers. Professionals know how to be concise, how to build up to a point, and how to write with "punch." Lou Dobbs managed to outclass every criticism I have ever written about President Bush in his column today. Check it out. I don't always agree with Dobbs (including his stance on immigration), but he's almost always well-written and thought provoking. Same for David Brooks, but I can't post a link to his stuff on the New York Time Web site 'cuz they've hidden him behind their pay-to-view service. Go to your library and read him there for free.

The Landis Portfolio

2006-08-09T18:51:00.000-05:00

I've followed professional bicycle racing for about 30 years. Back then you found out what happened in raced like the Tour de France a couple of months after it happened. Now you can follow it as it happens, live on the Internet. It's much more satisfying now!

Like a lot of people I was entertained by the Tour de France this year with multiple leaders, dramatic events, etc. It was the most interesting race since 1999, the first year Armstrong won. And before that you'd have to go back further, prior to the Miguel Indurain hegemony, to maybe the dramatic 1989 Tour or the bizarre internecine war between Hinault and Lemond in 1985 and 1986 (more soap operas than sporting events). Floyd Landis's near collapse on Stage 16 and dramatic comeback on Stage 17 seemed the stuff of legend.

Well, it still does, but for different reasons. Now it's the stuff of legend because Floyd will be the first Tour winner stripped of his title for doping. As much as I'd love to believe Floyd's protestations of innocence, I don't believe them. I'd love to eventually be proven wrong, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Today, on www.cyclingnews.com, it was reported that Patrick LeFevre, team manager of the Quick.Step team (formerly Mapei/Quick.Step), opined that Landis should be sued for setting back bike racing by 20 years, and also called for sanctions against the Phonak team due to it's record of 10 doping infractions by its riders in 3 years (this is the team that Tyler Hamilton rode for when he was busted for blood doping- along with a teammate. Coincidence?).

It's a bit rich, coming from LeFevre, whose own star riders Johan Musseuw and Frank Vandenbroucke were also found guilty of doping- the former just after retiring and the latter ending his career under a cloud and civil legal penalties. Musseuw was given a two year ban from cycling, but is actively involved in the Quick.Step team. And there are other riders associated with LeFevre such as Christophe Brandt and Richard Virenque who have been found to be doping.

Seems to me that LeFevre is the Belgian pot calling the kettle black. Doping is rife in professional sports, more obviously in cycling because it does more aggressive testing than most sports. To think that Landis is an exception or somehow more morally deficient than other people involved in professional cycling is either incredibly naive or Rovian in its disingenuousness.

The end of conservatism?

2006-08-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

In today's Washington Post, Ed. J. Dionne Jr opines that we may be witnessing the collapse of conservatism. News of such an event would be cause for delirious celebration among many of us on the left side of the political spectrum.

Not me.

Liberalism is about promoting freedom and progress through ensuring equality of opportunity, which may temporarily mean providing extra resources to disadvantaged groups or areas. Affirmative action, for example. But liberalism can lose perspective and engage in self-congratulatory, unproductive malarkey that not only fails to produce benefits but may unwittingly entrap those it seeks to help. If, for example, you lower graduation requirements to increase the high school graduation rate, those students will be entering college or the workforce with a subpar education and will be less likely to be successful adults.

The pushme-pullyou of two party politics, when it works well, limits the unwitting damage. The left provides a conscience and a heart for the right, and the right provides accountability and a cautionary brake for the left.

The bitter mean-spiritedness of the modern Republican Party, like the bastard child of the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge, has seemed to know no bounds since 1994 and especially since 2000. It's been distressing to watch evil perpetrated in the name of good, advocated by smarmy false prophets intent on robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. The Republican Party has spun off its rails and this has become increasingly obvious. Life in the service of two masters- Jesus and Mammon- is hard, and the Republican Party is seeing the price tag clearly.

I hope that conservatism remains a vibrant and honest political force. Neoconservatism has been too wobbly and lacking in a coherent practical philosophy- for example, opposing the invasion of Iraq under George H. W. Bush and vigorously supporing the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush- and is in need of a central overhaul of its ideas and philosophical underpinnings. It went from a fairly principled alternative to traditional conservatism to an opportunistic power- and money-grabbing free-for-all in astonishingly short order.

Both the right and the left need the countervailing forces mutually provided. Unfortunately few on either side of the aisle have the depth of vision to see it.

Democracy in Iraq

2006-08-03T13:26:00.000-05:00

I like the idea of democracy in Iraq. Heck, I like the idea of democracy, period. I think people should be able to participate in their government in a civil and organized manner. If something is wrong with the government, then there should be a process for peacably making changes. While this hasn't always worked smoothly in the U.S. (the Civil War, enfranchisement for women and blacks, civil rights, the development of unions and collective bargaining, the 60s, etc), overall democracy has been reasonably successful in the U.S. There's progress still to be made (e.g., a level educational and employment playing field, and still the thorny issue of ensuring equal rights for everyone).

I don't like the idea of militarily imposing democracy. When America invaded Iraq at Donald Rumsfeld's behest, we were given a variety of reasons for doing so. Saddam Hussein's support for al Qaeda (false per the 9/11 Commission), weapons of mass destruction (false per the failure to find any- which is odd given that the U.S. sold WMDs to Hussein), stabilizing the region and creating a new Middle East (so far not appearing likely). In this quest to achieve a still murky goal, we have overthrown a government and plunged a nation into war. Between 39,000 and 44,000 Iraqis are thought to have died based on reasonably verifiable reports (www.iraqbodycount.org whose figures have been quoted without credit to by President Bush). Tens of thousands more are without food, water, sanitation, shelter, safety.

Now General John Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, has testified before Congress that "Sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it" and "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."

While it is still much too early to conclude that Bush's War was a failure, the trends are quite obvious and they are not good. At what point does the President do what is responsible and just, and wake up to the fact that he needs a new plan- that that to get a new plan he has to get a new staff? Starting with Donald Rumsfeld. The action was Rumsfeld's idea, he micromanaged it all along and overrode the sober and considered opinions of military experts with decades of experience.

Corrective action cannot be taken as long as Rumsfeld continues to serve in government and as long as the President remains committed to this man's faulty view of the world.

The War Presidency

2006-07-30T17:16:00.000-05:00

The Israeli government has called a 48 hour suspension of aerial attacks on Lebanon, according to the news today, following the strike on Qana that killed more than 60 civilians. Many of them were children. It is a much needed breather in the hostilities.

Israel has maintained its right to disproportionate revenge, throughout the weeks of conflict with Hezbollah, in the face of mounting international criticism. A stunning failure has been that of President George W. Bush, who has not only basically given his tacit approval for Israel to "defend itself against terrorists" but has allowed the delivery of the very missiles with which Israel has attacked Lebanon's cities and neighborhoods. Far more women and children have died than Hezbollah militants in the Israeli blitz of Lebanon. Mr. Bush has gone as far as to suggest that Israel's aggression will lead to a better Middle East. He did not make clear how dead Muslim women and children leads to a better Middle East.

George W. Bush is flirting with sending the disastrous message that "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim." His failure to stand up for peace is astonishing and reveals much about his simplistic and violent world view. It also reveals how deep his ignorance goes, about human nature, about the cultures of the Middle East, and about the need for peaceful coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims. He has been and remains an American supremacist, made clearer each day as his arrogance and miscomprehensions are broadcast around the world.

The only world official talking sense right now is the man the Republicans love to malign, Kofi Annan. The first step, the only possible first step, on the road to peace is to first stop the violence. The amazing common sense of this has eluded the President of the United States throughout most of his term in office.