I took our neighbor Ronnie to the truck dealership last night to get their new vehicle. On the way he told me about a harrowing nature encounter he'd had just a few evenings before when his wife, Kathleen, was out of town.
"I called for Annie and she came hurtling in like a bullet, between my leg and into the house. The cats weren't but a second behind her, all raised fur and flashing claws. The coyote just stood there looking at us, the howls of its pack from the woods sounding louder than ever in my head.
"I backed slowly into the house, keeping an eye on it, and slowly closed the door. It showed no fear of me at all, or of the dogs or the house lights. It was practically in our front yard, and I'm just thankful it didn't get any of our pets."
That kind of thing happens more often than you'd believe out here in the hill country. There are stories of family dogs carried off for meals, and coyotes ranging right up to front doors. It's getting to the point where parents with little kisd are having to be extra careful.
In some neighborhoods the problem is deer overpopulation. We drove through one area recently and saw dozens of deer -- bucks, does, fawns -- all walking through the streets and front yards like we were in a forest. Well-intentioned no-hunting laws have backfired; with all of their natural predators eliminated, deer have exploded in population and are now reclaiming their territory. Only where there used to be plains and forests, now there are sprawling suburbs.
The one predator that hasn't been wiped out is the coyote. Smaller and smarter than their wolf cousins, coyotes will scavenge on just about anything. They're following their suddenly abundant deer prey into the neighborhoods and have no natural fear of humans any longer.
Out where we live, of course, the coyotes and deer are present simply because there's so much open land rather than overpopulation. But it makes me nervous -- with the horses and donkeys, not to mention the dogs, there's plenty of prey for hungry coyotes and I worry that Annie will find herself in danger some time during a walk or while I'm at work. Luckily donkeys -- even minis like ours -- will fight as a herd against predators, and coyotes generally stay away from them out of fear.
In this case, a half-ass is definitely better than none at all.
Friday, November 10, 2006
We're Ready For Your Close-Up, Wile E.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
The New SecDef
As you may have heard, the United States of America has a new Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates. To the dismay of many University of Texas and Louisiana State University graduates, he is an Aggie (well, sort of -- he was until yesterday the President of Texas A&M University, but not a graduate).
Texas Monthly has a well-timed profile of him running in the November issue, and I've been reading through it. I like what I see so far. One quote in particular stood out for me:
“Leadership in large public institutions requires a skill set different from the private sector,” Gates told me. “A&M and the CIA have this in common. Professionals in the organization got there before you were there and will be there after you leave. For changes to last, the professionals have to assimilate the changes and make them their own. My time here is finite. I want to build something that will long outlast me.”
I like it because it says that Bob Gates is a man who takes the long view. A man who understands how institutions, longer-lived by far than those who occupy their offices, are the surest protections from the excess of power. That's not surprising in someone who lived through the Nixon years, and saw first-hand what happens when an Executive seeks to overreach his authority. I like the quote, because it holds out hope that finally someone in the White House will understand that their first duty is not to security or politics or one man, but rather to the Constitution and the institutions that guard our liberty. Nothing is more precious than that -- Americans have shed blood for it for more than 200 years.
What has concerned me the most about the Bush Administration -- in particular Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez, and John Yoo -- is their unrelenting assault on the basic, foundational, structural elements that protect our liberty. Things like freedom of the press, judicial independence, Presidential signing statements essentially overturning laws without a veto, direct violation of the FISA laws (as confirmed by the Supreme Court), circumvention of international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, repeated arguments in court that their actions are beyond judicial review, suspension of habeus corpus.
These are institutions and structures built into the Constitution to protect us from corruption by those in power. "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" is no less true today than when Lord Aston wrote it -- men are weak, given to abuse their authority in pursuit of their own goals, whether those goals be good or bad. The temptation when one holds the levers of power is to use those levers to bludgeon the opposition into acquiescence. It is only through the rule of law -- the idea that no one is above the law, that we all agree on the same rules and processes, that the process matters -- that liberty is protected from the willful onslaught of the powerful.
The quote from Gates and his professional history suggest he understands this at a fundamental level. Others have pointed to his Iran-Contra involvement as evidence that he in fact cares only for ends, not means, but the rest of his career seems to belie that. He appears to be a man who cares about institutions, about doing things right, about seeing reality as it is and not as he wishes it were. Those are qualities long absent from this Administration, and I am relieved that, finally, someone appears to be on the way who reveres them.
When our legislators are sworn into service, they pledge to uphold not the Office of the President, or the generals of the military, or even the will of God. They swear to uphold and defend The Constitution. They do so not because it is a document that ties us down, that binds our wings and keeps us weak, but rather because it shields us from oppression, ensures our liberty, and underpins everything that has made this nation great for more than 200 years. I have opposed this Administration largely on grounds that it holds the self-same Constitution in contempt, that it has worked without relenting to weaken it, to build up one branch of government at the expense of others.
In that kind of battle, our liberty is the surest casualty.
I've heard people argue that these concerns are petty, that they can't wait to quit talking about rules and regulations and laws so we can get back to "catching the terrorists". But ultimately this is the most important fight of all. If we surrender the protections of the rule of law, we become no longer a nation of liberty and rights, but of cowards willing to sacrifice anything in the name of safety, in the end doomed to being preyed upon by the most ruthless, base, greedy nature that lurks in all of our hearts.
Freedom of the press. Respect for the rule of law. Separation of Powers. Checks and Balances. Adherence to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. These are the structures that will outlast and protect us, but only if we are constantly vigilant. Outside enemies can kill some of us, they can destroy property, but the only way we lose our American soul is from the inside, if we give it away to those who hunger for power over liberty. I think -- I hope -- that Bob Gates is a man who understands that, and who will fight the good fight both inside and outside this great country of ours. Let's get him to work already, before even more damage is done.
Gig 'em, Bob.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Can't Even Back Up and Down The Driveway
I am an idiot. I know this because on Monday I backed directly into Annie's truck -- I'll explain after the jump.
Not our truck, but close.
Unfortunately, none of those excuses excuse me.
So as you can see, I don't really have a leg to stand on, and as a consequence Annie now has to drive a rental for a few weeks. You see, what with the trash and the dog and the parking, I backed my Ranger full speed right into her truck's driver's side door. I will say this, though, I have very good aim -- all of the (considerable) damage was done to just that door and nothing else.
To make matters worse, in one of those cosmic examples of bad timing I had, just the night before, confidently explained to Annie how her lack of depth perception is the reason she thinks I'm a bad driver, and that in fact she is the one who's a bad driver. Clearly the anser to that little hypothesis is a big fat "WRONG"!
So maybe I can claim that as my excuse -- it's hard to be a good driver when your foot's in your mouth.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The Voting Experience
Annie and I went to vote today, as I hope all of you did. Our precinct station is in Joppa, a town even smaller than our own Bertram. We drove up to a nondescript white building next to a church, where just one beat-up pickup was in the gravel driveway. We walked in next to a freshly-plowed field; I think everyone should have the smell of horse manure in their nostrils on the way to the polling place. It kind of puts the whole thing in the right context, in all kinds of ways.
We were greeted by five nice older ladies who were the precinct captains. They had a crock pot full of something yummy-smelling for later in the evening, and a table full of pens, voter rolls, and snacks. To my surprise, even our tiny little county had electronic voting machines. They were easy to use, but walking away I felt somehow uneasy. This is strange for a technophile like me to admit, but the idea of nothing but a computer chip holding my vote makes me uncomfortable. At least with a paper ballot, you know that all interested parties (including myself) can get together in a room and look at the damn thing to make sure it's what I meant to put on there. But who can sit around and check electrons?
I wish we had some kind of paper trail, it would make me feel much more at ease. After I hit the submit button, for instance, it'd be nice to have a printout showing my vote. I could initial or sign it, then put it in a traditional paper ballot box. After the election, officials from the various parties and state or local government could spot check the precincts to make sure nothing went awry with the voting machines.
Or even better, maybe it's time for the entire country to take a look at an Oregon-style "Vote By Mail" system. The evidence so far is that such systems increase voter participation and information and is easier to verify.
We need to do something, though, because like professional sports, if the participants lose faith in the honesty of the system, the whole enterprise comes crashing down. Ultimately, what keeps the rule of law in force is that all of us living under it have confidence that everything is done on the up-and-up, without deceit or corruption, that we're all operating under the same fair, objective rules. If we lose that faith, then democracy simply cannot work.
After Florida, Ohio, and the myriad of complaints about electronic voting machines already coming out this year -- from both parties -- it's clear to me that we need to figure out a different way. And I think Oregon might already have solved it for us.
More Liberal America-Hating Bastards
Another unhinged, light-years-from-the-center, baby-eating liberal America-hating magazine has chimed in with their opinion that Bush has been a disaster and the GOP deserves to lose. I don't know why we allow these Democrat-loving leftist wingnuts to still publish in this country, they're all traitors who should be taken out and hung for not backing the President. Why just read what these libelous, slanted, whacked-out crazy people have said, blinded by their irrational partisan hatred:
It should surprise few readers that we think a vote that is seen—in America and the world at large—as a decisive “No” vote on the Bush presidency is the best outcome. We need not dwell on George W. Bush’s failed effort to jam a poorly disguised amnesty for illegal aliens through Congress or the assaults on the Constitution carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism or his administration’s endorsement of torture. Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.
As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves.
Hold on, what did you say? The magazine in question is "The American Conservative"?
Oh. Oh dear ...
Well they're still traitorous scum who hate America, just like the Democrats and the New York Times and the "Army Times" and the "Navy Times" and the "Air Force Times" and George Will and, and, and ...
You get the picture. More choice excerpts below the fold from the editorial in "The American Conservative" titled "GOP Must Go".
The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria...
There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq...
On Nov. 7, the world will be watching as we go to the polls, seeking to ascertain whether the American people have the wisdom to try to correct a disastrous course. Posterity will note too if their collective decision is one that captured the attention of historians—that of a people voting, again and again, to endorse a leader taking a country in a catastrophic direction. The choice is in our hands.
Opposition to this Administration is not restricted to the fringe left, light years from the center. Conservatives -- true conservatives -- have come to recognize what many of us on the other side understood long ago. This President and his feckless administration are as profoundly nonconservative as it gets. Their reckless spending, absurd foreign policy naivete, and unchecked assault on bedrock principles of checks and balances, are a complete betrayal of the traditions of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the brightest conservative minds of the last fifty years.
The next time you hear Rush or Michelle Malkin or Matt Drudge spout off about how crazed, angry, irrational, and out of touch with the mainstream the Democrats are, don't believe it. If Bush has lost even the likes of George Will and "The American Conservative", clearly this is not just partisan politics any more.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Great Moments in Spam
I, like all Americans, get a lot of e-mail spam every day. This one really caught my eye:
Good Morning, unaidable pesthole
I doubt I will be able to resist the allure of such an engaging greeting. Why, we may be face to face with a turning point in the history of salutations! "Good morning, unaidable pesthole!" I'll say to my boss each morning. Success is surely only days away now. Thank you, Spam!
MySpace for Nukes?
One of the most frightening foreign policy disasters facing the world for the last two decades has been the prospect of nuclear material, or knowledge of how to build a nuclear device, falling into the hands of terrorists. One of the major pieces of evidence used to justify war with Iraq was the Nigerian Yellowcake story (supposedly Iraqi intelligence agents were trying to buy enriched uranium from Nigeria, though -- like much else about our intelligence before the war -- this later turned out to be completely false).
So if securing nuclear secrets is so important, why did the US government release documents in Arabic on the Web for anyone to come and take a gander at which contained technical details of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program from before the 1991 Gulf War?
If your major concern as a nation is to keep terrorists from learning how to build a nuclear weapon, why the hell would you publish such secrets on the Web, in the very language of the people you're in a war with?
The fact that George Bush personally ordered these documents to be released over the objections of his own experts (particularly the head of the CIA, no less!) is astonishing. But what's even worse is, he will never be held accountable for it. No one in this Administration ever has to be held responsible for anything ("Donald Rumsfeld's doing a heckuva job!"). The President of the United States personally ordered a set of documents be publicly published which contained information that might help terrorists build a nuclear bomb, and he will never have to pay the price for it. You can bet your ass if the New York Times had done the same thing, conservatives across the country would be calling them traitors and howling for them to be thrown in jail.
Even if you're a Republican, you owe it to your country to vote straight Democrat tomorrow. These incompetent clowns are a threat to our national security. The only lesson they understand or respect is defeat at the ballot box. Hopefully a Republican drubbing tomorrow will give the adult members of the Administration a lever to use to club Bush into not fucking things up any more than he already has over the next two years.
That's assuming there ARE any adults in this administration, something I am seriously starting to doubt. Honestly, releasing untranslated documents you seized from your greatest enemy that you don't know anything about on the web for the people you're at war with to use in building a nuclear device is breathtaking, awe-inspiring, nigh-unbelievable stupidity.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Why Does the Military Hate the Troops?
Yes, the exit is that way ...
And yet on Monday, in a rare joint maneuver, the Army Times, the Air Force Times, and the Navy Times will all run the same editorial (pasted in full below the fold) calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.
So does this mean now that the military hates the troops, too? Or is it possible -- just possible -- that pointing out someone in the leadership is an idiot is, in fact, also supporting the troops?
Time for Rumsfeld to go
"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."
That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.
But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.
Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.
Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.
Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."
Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.
But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.
For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.
Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.
And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.
Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.
This is a mistake.
It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.
These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.
And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.
Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.
This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:
Donald Rumsfeld must go.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Fat, Drunk, and Stupid
Apparently Dean Wormer was wrong -- you CAN go through life fat, drunk, and stupid. If you're a mouse, anyway:
Study: Fat doses of red wine extract help obese mice stay healthy
I for one will do my part to help extend this critically important study into human trials by continuing to put on weight and guzzle cheap wine. It's the least I can do as a supporter of science.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Can You Even SAY "Anal Lightning"?
In every marriage there are little things that couples nitpick about. For some, it's which way the toilet paper should hang off the roll, whether the loose end should go in the front or the back. For others it's where you squeeze the toothpaste out.
For Annie and I, one such minor little disagreement is over how to get the water you use to wash your mouth out after brushing. I prefer to cup my hands beneath the faucet. When my cupped hands are full, I bring them to my lips and fill my mouth with water. Annie, on the other hand, shoves her whole head into the sink and guzzles from the spigot directly.
I'm not saying my way is right and her way is wrong. I'm just saying that my way carries absolutely no risk that it will cause lightning to fly out of my butt:
Lightning exits woman's bottom:
October 09, 2006 12:00am
Article from: The Australian
A WOMAN has suffered severe burning to her anus after being struck by lightning which hit her in the mouth and passed right through her body.
Natasha Timarovic, 27, was cleaning her teeth at in her home in the Croatian city of Zadar when lightning struck the building.
She said: "I had just put my mouth under the tap to rinse away the toothpaste when the lightning must have struck the building." She was wearing rubber bathroom shoes at the time and so instead of earthing through her feet it appears the electricity shot out of her backside," a medic told local newspaper, 24 Sata.
Truth From the Gipper
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream - the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order - or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path," - Ronald Reagan, stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
With thanks to Andrew Sullivan (again). He's giving Ed Brayton a run for his money in the "Most Often Linked To By Jeff" sweepstakes. I find it interesting that the two bloggers I respect and read the most are a deist libertarian and a Catholic conservative. Strange. Clearly baby-eating atheist liberals aren't what they used to be. Sigh.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Picking and Choosing Belief
A discussion is going on in the comments of another thread on this blog, here, about how non-believers pick and choose which portions of a religious text (the Bible in this case) to accept and which to reject. I thought it was interesting enough to bring up on the main page. I'll hide it below the fold for those of you who are uninterested (which I would best is most of you!).It thus does not seem rational to pull a morsel or two out of the gospels as good advice or philosophy and reject everything else He said and did as a hoax, the words of a lunatic, or fabrication.
You keep coming back to this, and it honestly doesn't make sense to me. Let's say a man says to you, "If you step onto that burning log, you will be burned. Also, I am a bear." This man, clearly, is not a bear. Does that mean you should also disregard his good advice about not stepping on the log?
Even if Christ was not the Son of God, that doesn't mean his Sermon on the Mount should be tossed aside as foolishness -- it contains great wisdom regardless of Christ's divinity. The meek really do inherit the earth sometimes. Being kind to those less advantaged than you is both wise and practical. There's no reason to reject that just because I don't believe he was resurrected. That would really be irrational.In the end for an atheist, is it just too much to believe, and why is it too much to believe? Are doubts really based on lack of evidence or could there never be enough evidence? How much does one's view of the world and themselves affect an honest appraisal of the historical Jesus? Is there just a pre-established belief it could not have happened the way it says (for whatever personal reason), so theories must be made to explain how it could be fiction? (I've read a lot of those theories, and while they sound like rational possibilities on the surface, there's not a shred of evidence to support them, as compared to all the evidence on the Christian view.) Intellectually then, I find the rejectionist view to be quite thin. Your thoughts?
Christ rising from the dead
The guiding principle for most skeptics is the notion that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Claims in the New Testament that are not extraordinary, therefore, do not need a terribly high level of evidence for me to accept them. For example, lots of people who would fit Christ's general description were alive at the time, so I don't have a problem believing he probably lived. It's the extraordinary claims -- his resurrection, that he was the son of god, that he is the only way to get to the divine, that he could heal wounds and raise the dead -- require more evidence than the simple fact of someone saying it was so. It is these claims that require the most picking and choosing, so I will focus on how I go about doing so.
Joseph Smith reading the golden tablets in a hat, from South Park
Second, I look at how convincing the evidence for the claim is to non-Christians. I take this approach because of the example of science, wherein people of wildly divergent belief systems nonetheless agree on basic scientific principles. You can be Hindu, atheist, Christian, or Muslim and still agree on the age of the earth, for instance. Claims that are persuasive regardless of religious, ethnic, or cultural background have a much higher likelihood of being true, in my experience. Regarding the resurrection of Christ, billions of people around the world have examined the evidence and come away unconvinced. That doesn't mean it's wrong necessarily, but it's obviously not in the same league of convincing as, say, Newtonian physics.
Third, I look at the evidence for or against the specific claim that are not part of the religious canon itself. Regarding Christianity, this would include contemporary Roman accounts, documents like the Dead Sea Scrolls from contemporary Jewish leaders, and other writings from the first couple of hundred years A.D. by various Christian sects (one resource for this I used is Lost Christianities" by Bart D. Ehrman).
Fourth, I try to figure out of there is a non-miraculous explanation for what might have happened. The most likely candidates are later modification to the original text or a natural phenomenon that the witnesses misinterpreted. The modern Catholic church approaches claims of miracles in the same way -- an entire office of clerics is devoted to figuring out which claims of the supernatural are real and which are not, so I don't think this is an unreasonable approach to take.
So let's look at a specific example to see how this would work in practice. I won't go through them all, that would make this even more tedious than it already is.
32 Matthew 27:52-53. "And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many."
Clearly this is an extraordinary claim, hopefully we can agree on that. Surely such an incredible occurrence would have earned loud exclaim and documentation throughout the region, yet there is no mention of it whatsoever in contemporary accounts.
None.
People got up out of their graves and appeared to many, yet not one single person thought this remarkable enough to write down. No journal entry of "Uncle Bosephus rose from the dead today and came by for a chat, it was nice." That's a pretty big obstacle to overcome.
Could there be a documentary mistake of some sort? Looking at http://ffrf.org/about/bybarker/rise.php, there appears to be evidence that there is. Most scholarship indicates that the early Christians believed not in a physical resurrection but rather a spiritual one. The actual rising of the dead body appears to be a later addition. That seems to be a reasonable possibility. Using Occam's Razor, then, I would tend to accept the simplest explanation as the most likely, and conclude that the dead probably did not rise in massive numbers as described, but that this is a later addition by entities interested in supporting their version of Christianity over competing ones.
I hope that helps explain one way that one person (me) tries to figure out both overall truth of the gospels and how to "pick and choose" what parts to believe and which to reject. I understand that others would look at the exact same evidence and come to the opposite conclusion; such is life. I don't require that everyone have the same belief system I do, and I readily admit that I could be in error not only about this specific example but about the entire edifice. Nonetheless, this is the approach I take, and these are the conclusions I have come to. I didn't start out looking for reasons to disbelieve, but I was willing to go where the evidence led me. And it has led me to atheism. I do not find atheism incompatible with the position that Christ still had wisdom to impart, but I understand how a believer would find that position untenable at best.
I hope you won't begrudge me the lessons that I do take from Christ's life, even if in your eyes I am missing the best parts of all.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Derb on Religion
With thanks to Andrew Sullivan for pointing it out, I really enjoyed John Derbyshire's column about his religious feelings. I think most people in America today tend to conflate conservatism and religion -- if you're conservative, you're religious, and you can't have one without the other. I think that's pretty clearly false. Derbyshire's a staunch (to put it mildly) political conservative, working for one of the most conservative magazines in the country. And yet, he admits to not being a Christian or even religious in a traditional sense. PZ Meyers, on the other hand, is a militant atheist and about as left-wing a guy as you'll find. I've known many very religious Christians who were rabidly left, and others who were rabidly right.
Anyway, here are a few excerpts from the column that struck a chord (all emphasis is mine).
...
I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing special about us at all.
But doesn’t the I, the Me, that I mentioned earlier — the self-awareness that we humans uniquely have — doesn’t that make us special? Do tigers, toads, and ticks have an I? Do they have a connection to the Creator? I don’t know. Perhaps they have a fuzzier one — perhaps higher animals, at any rate, see through a glass as we do, but more darkly. In any case, that only makes us special in the way that an elephant is special by virtue of having that long trunk — more exactly, the way the first creatures who were able to register visible light as images were special. We are part of nature — an exceptionally advanced and interesting part, but… not special.
....
I have now come to think that it really makes no difference, net-net. You can point to people who were improved by faith, but you can also see people made worse by it. Anyone want to argue that, say, Mohammed Atta was made a better person by his faith? All right, when Americans say “religion” they mean Christianity 99 percent of the time. So: Can Christianity make you a worse person? I’m sure it can. If you’re a person with, for example, a self-righteous conviction of your own moral superiority, well, getting religion is just going to inflame that conviction. Again, I know cases, and I’m sure you do too. The exhortations to humility that you find in all religions seem to be the most difficult teaching for people to take on board. Mostly, I think it makes no difference.
...
The trick, if you want a reasonably happy and stable society, is to corral human nature into useful, non-socially-destructive styles of expression: sexuality into marriage, or at least some kind of formal and constrained bonding; aggression into sport or military training; the power urge into consensual politics; cheating into conjuring, drama, and games like poker. (I don’t mean you should cheat at poker, only that you need some powers of deception to play poker well.) Any aspect of human nature can get out of hand, as we see with these Muslim fanatics that are making such nuisances of themselves nowadays. That doesn’t mean the aspect is bad, just that some society has done a bad job of corraling [sic] it.
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Please remember, too, what Roman Catholicism was like when I was growing up, as seen from England. It was the religion of Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, chaotic and communist-trending Italy, recently-keenly-pro-Nazi Austria (don’t let The Sound of Music fool you — the Anschluss was more a wedding than a rape), Latin America as then personified by the buffoonish Juan Perón and his sinister wife, and, yes, Éamon de Valera’s nasty, corrupt, willfully under-developed, people-exporting Ireland. That’s not even to mention France. As I looked out on it from the England of the 1950s and 1960s, Catholicism was the religion of poverty, fascism, obscurantism, and bad government; and I don’t think you can say that this was a wildly distorted picture.
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I’d go a bit further than that. Conservatism, including (including especially, I think) religious conservatism, has at its core an acceptance of, a respect for, human nature. We conservatives are the people who see humanity plain, or strive to, and who wish to keep our society in harmony with what we see. Paul Johnson has noted how leftists always used to talk about building socialism. Capitalism doesn’t require building. It’s just what happens if you leave people alone. It arises, in short, from human nature, and only needs harmonizing under some mild, reasonable, laws and customary restraints. You don’t have to build it by forging a New Capitalist Man, or anything like that.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Some good quotes
I was reading through some quotes on BuzzFlash, and this one from Gandhi really caught my eye:"Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Someone asked a few months ago on this forum how I could consider Jesus a great moral teacher if I don't also believe he was the Son of God. My first reaction to this question is always to point to Gandhi. I am not a Hindu, and I do not believe in Gandhi's theology at all. And yet, I find him to be one of the most persuasive and moving moralists in history. We all have a lot to learn from him, regardless of what god we happen to worship (or not worship as the case may be). Morality and theology overlap, but one does not wholly contain the other. There is great wisdom to be found in the world from those who do not look like us, or think like us, or believe as we do, if we only will open our hearts to them.
Here are some other great quotes from that link, none perhaps as moving as the one above, but that spoke to me nonetheless; hope you enjoy them:"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th US president (1908-1973)"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
-- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."
-- Dave Barry, author and columnist (1947-)"We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us."
-- Robert Hayden, poet and educator (1913-1980)"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
- Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
- George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
- Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)"It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
- William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the American Civil War (1820-1891)"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
- Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
- John Arbuthnot, writer and physician (1667-1735)"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground."
-- Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, editor and orator (1817-1895)"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-- Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--Theodore Roosevelt
Motivational Posters
I found a really cool web page that lets you build motivational posters -- you know, the kind of thing you see hanging on the walls at work that are supposed to inspire you to forget that you work in a dead-end hellhole contributing nothing to society. Here's what I came up with for animal rescue, using the incredibly cute photo Annie took last weekend of Blackie:
(click for a larger view)
Over the weekend, two of the dogs we're fostering found new homes.
One I didn't mention before, Lefty (hence the names Pancho and Lefty, from the Willie Nelson song), who I thought would be the hardest to place. But a really nice family from Austin just lost their long-term pet terrier to cancer, and Lefty struck a chord with them.
The other was Whitey, one of the three puppies I posted about on Friday. Two young women who attend college around here were looking for a pet, and wanted to rescue one rather than go to a breeder or whatnot. They met Annie at the kennel housing the puppies and dithered about which one to take, as they are all so cute. Finally one of them said "You know, I bet Whitey will the hardest to adopt out, since she's so energetic. So we'll take her." I thought that was the nicest thing; those women had great hearts and a compassionate spirit, and they're truly angels for little Whitey.
We've still got four fosters at the house: Brownie and Blackie (the two other pups in that litter); Jackson (a big ol' black German shepherd who's super sweet); and of course Pancho, the little brown terrier. Hopefully they'll all find great homes soon, but all in all it was still a great weekend for animal rescue.
Friday, October 27, 2006
META: Read More now works!
Brilliant!
Before clicking on the link, you wouldn't see this text. Hopefully now it'll be easier to browse through articles to find only the one(s) you're interested in reading. You still are downloading all the text and pictures (sorry Aunt Sharon!), but at least visually the page will look less cluttered. Sorry for the delay on getting this implemented, but I was at the mercy of people smarter than me, waiting on them to figure it out :-)
Louisiana Crooks -- er, Politicians
I grew up in Louisiana, and its politics have always driven me nuts. I was in high school during the Edwin Edwards (Governor) years, and I remember hearing constantly that "Yes, he's a crook, but he's our crook." That never made sense to me. In my four-color, comic-book world, if a guy was dirty he was dirty. You didn't shrug and put your arm around him, you wrapped him in spider webs and dragged his sorry butt to jail.
Since then Louisiana's come a long way. There have been a number of sober, honest, hard-working realists in the governor's office and things have gotten better. My family's been involved on the local level there as well, running for judgeships in Alexandria and helping out on the school board in Zachary, for example. I'm a Texan now, but I'm proud of the work they and others in Louisiana have done helping to clean up politics in that state.
Unfortunately, you still get jokers like Representative William Jefferson (D-LA). This is the guy accused in an FBI affidavit of (allegedly) accepting $100,000 in bribes from an FBI informant. All but $10,000 of it was recovered a few days later. He denies all wrongdoing, of course, but if he expects us to believe that he probably spent the other ten g's on crack, because that dog won't hunt.
He was stripped of his House positions by the Democratic leadership, but that didn't make him resign.
He was not endorsed by the Louisiana Democratic Party, but that didn't keep him from running.
And he's being fingered by the FBI, but that's not keeping people from voting for him:"All of them are doing basically the same thing - but he just got caught," Herman Hill, 53, said about Jefferson. Wearing a "Don't Mess With Jeff" campaign pin, Hill grinned when asked to explain his views on politicians: "They're stealing. They say they want to help people, but they're helping themselves."
--MSNBC.com
I read stuff like that, and I want to smack Herman Hill, 53, in the head with a side of beef. Hey Herman, if you know the guy's a crook, don't vote for him!
I don't know what's worse, people like Jefferson who steal and then lie about it, or people like Herman Hill who get stolen from, then grin and hold their wallet out again, saying "Hey you missed the fifty in the side pocket!" Corruption isn't something you root out and then are done with, unfortunately. You have to be constantly vigilant. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "But they all do it!" isn't an excuse, and it's not an option. Louisiana deserves better than this dirtbag and the idiots who vote for him.
Frederick Douglass
I followed a link from some other story, and it brought me to a complete standstill. I hope you don't mind, but I was so moved I really wanted to share it here. It's from Frederick Douglass' book "My Bondage, My Freedom", the story of his journey from slave to freeman in 1800's America. In this part, he is on his way to the local "slave breaker", a man renowned for his ability to take even the most willful slaves and turn them into docile, broken workers. All emphasis is mine.
What must it be like, to have the lyrical and soaring soul of a poet like Douglass, and to know that your entire existence is nothing in the eyes of the law, that other men regard you literally as property, worthy of as little regard as a table or an oxen?
I hate that our country bore the stain of slavery for so much longer than the rest of the Western world. I hate that we had to fight a war to convince one bunch of men that they could not own another batch of men. But I am proud that the concept of liberty is enshrined in our Constitution, and that our history -- however slowly it may have crept at times -- has been one of relentless expansion of liberty to more and more people. The idea of women or non-Whites being allowed to vote, that they were covered under the rubric of "all men are created equal", may have been anathema to many of the Founding Fathers, but once the seeds of freedom are planted they grow wild, eventually strangling the narrow prejudices and greedy hands that try to hack them down.
Rescue Puppies
I don't think I've written about this before, which is surprising given how much of our time is spent on it, but Annie is a big-time dog rescuer. She takes dogs from local shelters who face death, cleans them up, then finds them a new home. Sometimes we "foster" them at our place, while other times we place them in other temporary shelters, but the goal is to get them out of harm's way and into a permanent home as quickly as possible.
For the most part Annie focuses on dogs that the shelter has deemed "unlikely to be adopted" for one reason or another, because those are the animals most at risk of being killed. And the toll is high -- the Austin animal shelter puts down more than 12,000 animals a year. Every dog we bring into foster care and eventually place would almost certainly have been killed otherwise.
Animal rescue sometimes feels like trying to hold back the tide. There are so very many dogs in need, and you can only ever hope to save a small portion of them. It's easy to think you're not making enough of a difference, but I'm pretty sure it makes a huge difference to the actual dogs you save.
We don't take puppies out very often, because puppies are inherently more adoptable than adult dogs -- they're built to be cute, and a random person walking through a shelter is naturally drawn to them. But in the last week we've taken in four pups, which is definitely a record for us. I've posted pictures of them to the right. Three came in one litter, all from the same mom, but as different as can be. With staggering originality we named them Blackie, Whitey, and Brownie. I sense a Pulitzer for "Temporary Animal Naming" in our very near future.
Whitey looks just like the dog in "Little Rascals", right down to the black spot over one eye. She was the only girl of the three, and full of energy and spitfire. Brownie looks for all the world like a Dachshund, with short stumpy legs and the same short brown fur, but you can definitely see his terrier mom's influence in his face. And finally, Blackie is a ball of long fur, shy and reserved, much happier to snuggle up with a human than running around with the dogs.
The other newcomer to the ranch is Pancho, the longer-haired terrier. He's got light brown eyes, which is pretty unusual, and is very small and snuggly. His expressions remind me of a mini poem in a doggerel book we have around here:
I'm as small as the cat.Annie has gotten so good at finding new homes for our foster dogs that we end up not having them around for very long; I'll be surprised if Pancho lasts the day, in fact, he's so cute. You fall in love with them so fast, but you have to keep a little back because you know you're only a temporary waystation in their journey. We've almost lost count of the dogs we've rescued over the years, but -- sadly -- there are all too many still out there waiting for their own angel to come and pull them out of their misery.
What's up with that?!
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Why the Hell Would Anyone Watch Televised Poker?
I watch a lot of poker on TV. Yes, I am fully aware that this makes me a complete tool, but in my defense, my mother also watches a lot of poker on TV.
Hmmm, somehow that doesn't make me feel any less lame now that I see it written out and all ...
I hear you now, snickering behind your computer screen, mocking me. Who in their right mind would want to watch a card game on TV? Why that's almost as ridiculous as broadcasting dominoes or Scrabble on ESPN!
And yet, here we are, with televised poker bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year and spawning a surge of popularity that recently resulted in the largest monetary prize pool of any event in history. Depending on your age and philosophical bent, this is either:
So why do I like poker on TV? Poker, while not a sport, nonetheless shares many of the same attributes that make watching sports on TV fun. It's quick, there's a clear winner (and perhaps even more importantly, a clear loser), it's easy to learn but hard to master, and the results are unpredictable. Chaos can rule, but always within boundaries. And the home viewer gets to feel superior because they have access to information not available to the players "in the field".
What makes poker particularly compelling to watch on TV is the same thing that makes "Oedipus" a great play -- you know what's happening even though the actors on stage do not. Because you can see the cards that are hidden from all of the other players, you know that Barry Greenstein does not, in fact, have the best hand with his pocket aces, even though it's completely rational for Barry to think that he does.
It's like watching a horror movie, screaming at the screen "DO NOT GO INTO THAT SHOWER!", knowing all the while that she's damnsure going to walk into the shower.
It's like the sick fascination you have watching a good friend hooking up with a total psycho, knowing full well that she's nuts and he's going to regret it, but he can't see it at all. You want to look away, but you can't.
It's like a great detective show, watching people furiously thinking through multiple possibilities, appreciating how intelligent and canny they are for settling on the right answer. We already know whodunnit, but they do not, and therein lies the fascination. Watching these guys work a table really lets you appreciate how good they are, it lets you taste, at least for a moment, what it is like to be in their shoes, running the odds, asking your gut if you really think you have the best hand or not.
Watching poker on TV gives you the chance to feel like you've won or lost thousands of dollars without having to actually risk it, much like watching football gives you the chance to feel like you just pounded the living crap out of another guy without having to actually risk getting hurt. 
Well, that and watching Phil Hellmuth and Mike "The Mouth" Matusow getting taken for their entire bankrolls -- multiple times -- by the real cash game pros on "High Stakes Poker". Seeing those guys get rolled is almost as much fun as watching Oklahoma lose a football game.
Almost.
