The News from China...




  | ¶ 4:24 PM

  A whole bunch of people who don't exist according to the religious right, can be found referred to here.

There are probably around 1,000 intersex babies born every year in the United States. The numbers can add up. The term actually refers to six different conditions where children are born with ambiguous sexual structures.

The majority are the result of something going wrong early in a pregnancy, where the fetus is exposed to an inappropriate amount of hormones in the uterus.

You can get genetic girls who look from the outside like males because they were exposed to male hormones at a critical stage of fetal development. Conversely, you can get genetic males looking like females because they didn't get enough male hormones in utero.

There are a whole group of more mixed external manifestations of gender that also occur.

  | ¶ 6:00 AM

  Public policy and how it gets that way...




Caine in the TV show from the '60's "Kung Fu" was an amalgam of an amalgam: the part was the very embodiment of the martial arts genre as spaghetti western of which each borrowed from each other so that the origin was as mixed as Caine's character: A totally yin-yang sort of thing.

And so it is with public policy...

Link 2

...The tax rate on investment income is typically much lower than the rate on wages and salary. For example, the tax on a $1,000 capital gain from the sale of stock generally comes to $150, while the tax on $1,000 of salary can be as high as $350. The special low rate on investment income allows investors to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year. And yet the alternative tax does not treat that super-low rate as a tax shelter.

To be fair and efficient - and to help make up the revenue that would be lost by shielding middle-income taxpayers from the alternative tax - investment income should be taxed the same as ordinary earned income under the alternative system...

Well, yes, right certainly. But how come it hasn't happened?

Link 3

"There are a lot of people in America who look at what we do here in Washington with nothing but cynicism," said Emanuel. "Heck, there are a lot of people in Washington who look at us with nothing but cynicism." But, he went on, "there are good people here. Decent people on both sides of the political aisle and on both sides of the reporter's notebook."

...this particular community happens to be in the nation's capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders -- the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.

They call the capital city their "town."

- Sally Quinn


Bill Galston, former deputy domestic policy adviser to Clinton and now a professor at the University of Maryland, says ... "most people in Washington believe that most people in Washington are honorable and are trying to do the right thing..."

"This is a community in all kinds of ways," says ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts, whose parents both served in Congress...

"This is our town," says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut,...



"This is a contractual city," says Chris Matthews, who once was a top aide to the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. "There are no factories here. What we make are deals.

Now admittedly, Sally Quinn was talking Lewinsky here, but let's face it: a community is a community is a community.

And why not include Daniel Okrent in that community?

Why not include ourselves?

Ultimately we run the United States- we are the bosses ultimately.

No matter what comes out of the NY Times, or the Washington Post or Fox, we still can know from where our money comes and where our money goes, and why and what is done in our name with the taxes we pay.

However, I think some people may not be aware of that.

Certainly not Joe Liberman.

And some, I suspect, may not care, like the folks who pay for rendition.

  | ¶ 5:11 AM

  Some more stuff on China you don't read every day...
Sort of fitting for Memorial Day, too: to keep the peace, let's try to figure out what lies we've been told by whom. However, this has to do with the events at Tiananmen Square, which happened 16 years ago this week. In the post below, I referenced this op-ed, in the Japan Times, which had the surprising paragraph:

That the Western media have largely gone along with Tokyo's claims over Yasukuni is further proof of just how easily they accept distorted views of China. Other examples include the Tiananmen massacre myth (check the now declassified cables from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time for the true story), the claim that China's claims over Taiwan are expansionist (check the terms on which every major power has accepted Beijing's sovereignty over the island), or Beijing's constant reference to Taiwan as a "renegade province" (check the English-language Web sites for the main Chinese newspapers to find the reality). And so on.

(Emphasis mine)

Well, I took up the author of that piece, Gregory Clark, on, so to speak. Here is the declassified history of Tiananmen square.

In addition to providing information on the events of June 4, the cables provide dramatic examples of the kinds of intelligence provided by diplomatic reporting. Document 14, an embassy cable from June 4, reports on confrontations between soldiers and protesters, some of which ended in deaths, and vandalism by military personnel, who one source claimed were breaking the windows of shops, banks, and other buildings. On the same day, another cable from the U.S. Embassy (Document 15) reports, among other things, the statement of a Chinese-American who had witnessed the crackdown who claimed that, "The beating to death of a PLA soldier, who was in the first APC to enter Tiananmen Square, in full view of the other waiting PLA troops, appeared to have sparked the shooting that followed." In addition to these eyewitness accounts of the crackdown, other cables (Document 16) also provide information on PLA troop positions and casualty estimates.

One section of the Secretary of State's Morning Summary for June 5th (Document 17), titled "After the Bloodbath," focuses on developments in Beijing. It reports that "troops continued to fire indiscriminately at citizens in the area near Tiananmen Square." It also notes the destruction of a large number of military vehicles, threats to execute students, and the potential for violent resistance by students. The intelligence report also provides details on the worldwide reaction to the massacre, noting the unanimous condemnation of the "bloody repression" by foreign leaders, "regardless of ideology.

There's much more here. For example, this document shows that what was going on was far more chaotic than what we were told at the time. And this document, which says "civilian deaths probably did not reach the figure of 3,000 used in some press reports," but believes that the figure put forward by the Chinese Red Cross of 2,600 military and civilian deaths with 7,000 wounded to be "not an unreasonable estimate."

Make no mistake about it: this is a black stain on China's leadership at the time, but it was clearly something that was not as controlled and planned as we were led to believe.



  | ¶ 6:28 AM

  "We fail to see that it is not in the Western interest to have the Chinese and the Indians at each other's throats."


Link

Here's something you don't read about every day.

hina's successful moves to improve ties with India have done more than sabotage Tokyo's hopes for an anti-China alliance with New Delhi. They have also put an end to the myth that China's alleged aggressions against India since the 1960s would prevent any rapprochement between the two countries.

The key to this strange belief was the claim that China in 1962 had launched an unprovoked border attack against India. That claim was a blatant lie -- and one of the brighter and shinier variety. It was a classic example of the ease with which Western governments and intelligence agencies, together with their friends in academic, media and research organs, combine to distort information and blacken China's reputation in Asia.

In 1962 I was China desk officer in Canberra's Department of External Affairs. For much of the year there had been reports of Indian troops pushing into Chinese positions along the Sino-Indian border. On Oct. 20 we had a further report about clashes between Chinese and Indian troops at the Thag La ridge near the NEFA (North East Frontier Area) border, which was to lead to a Chinese counterattack into northern India...

the maps in front of me showed the Thag La ridge to be north of even the Indian-claimed frontier. So India must have attacked China first, and in an area where China had already offered major territory concessions (condemned, incidentally, by Taipei as a sellout to India).

When my cables to London and Washington confirmed this rather important fact, I assumed I could suggest to my superiors to ease up on their instant denunciations of Chinese "aggression" and their promises of immediate arms to India. Their response was swift: "We fail to see that it is not in the Western interest to have the Chinese and the Indians at each other's throats."...

he myth of Chinese aggression against peaceful India was to distort Asian affairs for more than 40 years. With the help of Western black-information agencies -- British especially -- it was to provide much of the justification later for Western intervention in Indochina. Detailed documentation from Beijing proving the location of the Thag La ridge was ignored...

Now, finally, with last month's historic meeting between the Chinese and Indian prime ministers in New Delhi, the myth is being buried. Both sides have agreed to settle frontier differences -- something China has long been able to do with all its other contiguous neighbors, often generously. India has dropped any challenge to China's sovereignty in Tibet. China has recognized Indian sovereignty over the once semiautonomous Himalayan region of Sikkim. A strategic partnership has been promised.

There's more there; many assertions to check out.

But it's worthwhile to note that before we get knee-deep in knee-jerk ideological reactions to others, that what we think of as "facts" might not be facts at all.


  | ¶ 5:39 AM

  Corporate radio reacts to the podcasters...


Link

Hee hee hee...they are soooo cooked.


  | ¶ 10:02 AM

  A bubble for rich people beginning to burst?
Link

After big losses by some funds and generally stagnant performance this year, more investors have begun asking for their money back, said several experts who track the vast, unregulated private investment groups that cater to the world's richest investors.

Redemption requests that may come due in late June or in early July are expected to undercut the performance of some already struggling hedge funds as managers unwind market bets so they can come up with enough cash to return to investors.

"People were sold on the idea that hedge funds were investment products that had no down months and would perform all the time," said Cyril Delamare, a director at Tara Capital SA, a Swiss advisory firm. "Now they're waking up to the reality that this isn't true."

Some hedge fund investors and brokers are talking of a less likely, but more worrying scenario: A wave of redemptions could force lots of managers in the same market to liquidate positions at the same time, sparking a chain reaction of sharp price drops that could force other investors to lose money.

Still, those same market professionals dismiss doomsday scenarios, including comparisons to the infamous collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund whose demise prompted the Federal Reserve to step in to avert a full-scale market meltdown.

In recent years, wealthy people have herded into hedge funds at an unbridled clip, expecting steady returns irrespective of the market's usual peaks and valleys. These private investment partnerships are now estimated to oversee more than $1 trillion, after managing less than $40 billion in 1990.

Some of that enthusiasm may be beginning to wane.

The Hennessee Hedge Fund Index, a gauge of about 900 managers overseeing at least half of the capital in the industry, fell 1.62% in the first four months of 2005.

In April, the industry recorded its worst losses in more than two years, according to Tremont Capital Management, a Rye, N.Y.-based investment firm that tracks hedge funds. See full story.

This is problematic for the rest of us, because declines in prices of derivative securities must, at some point, due to a tendency towards efficient markets and the opportunity for arbitrage, affect the prices of the securities on which derivatives are based.

In short that means your IRA/401(k) is also vulnerable, thanks to people who thought that this type of security would always go up.

This is, I think traceable to the rampant innumeracy of Americans (and others?): no matter the gambling strategy, there's always the possibility of gambler's ruin.

Or, to put it another way: one guy making money on some long/short position means that there's a complementary position in which another guy's losing his shirt.


  | ¶ 7:08 AM

  Two Joes not on my iPod




A rapper named "Fat Joe"...



...and "Big Joe"

It's easy to confuse them, I think.


  | ¶ 6:48 AM

  YESSSS....MST3K comes to a group near you!


link

If you soak up the Jackson Pollocks at the Museum of Modern Art while listening to the museum's official rented $5 audio guide, you will hear informative but slightly dry quotations from the artist and commentary from a renowned curator. ("The grand scale and apparently reckless approach seem wholly American.")

But the other day, a college student, Malena Negrao, stood in front of Pollock's "Echo Number 25," and her audio guide featured something a little more lively. "Now, let's talk about this painting sexually," a man's deep voice said. "What do you see in this painting?"

A woman, giggling, responded on the audio track: "Oh my God! You're such a pervert. I can't even say what that - am I allowed to say what that looks like?"

The exchange sounded a lot more like MTV than Modern Art 101, but for Ms. Negrao it had a few things to recommend it. It was free. It didn't involve the museum's audio device, which resembles a cellphone crossed with a nightstick. And best of all, it was slightly subversive: an unofficial, homemade and thoroughly irreverent audio guide to MoMA, downloaded onto her own iPod.

The ability to create counter-narratives is the ability to redistriubte power.

It is also cool, and a joy to see happen.


  | ¶ 4:09 AM

  Memorial Day Thoughts




Does this offend you? It is a photo of Yasukini Jinja (Shrine) (or 安国神社).

I have to say, to me their website has one of the characteristics of the Focus on the Family website: it kind of ignores the fact that there were lots of nasty things done, and puts a religious veneer on that avoidance of nastiness.

The Kami of Yasukuni Jinja offered up their lives in battle with prayers for the eternal independence and peace of Japan, and the sincere wish that wonderful history and traditions of Japan, left to us by our ancestors, will continue to be conveyed to future generations.

The peace and prosperity of Japan today is the fruit of the noble work of the Kami of Yasukuni Jinja.

Let us have greater love for "Our Japan" that the Kami of Yasukuni Jinja sacrificed even their lives to defend.

I think this mixing of politics and religion is as bad as any other- and quite a bit worse than many.

Having said that, the dead are the dead who became dead in the struggle of war, a struggle often marred, instigated, and continued by a fatal stupidity. And the vast majority of the dead, certainly those remembered as 安国神社, were somebody's children in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps drunken with nationaist idealism, but who, in another time and place, would hardly hurt a fly. But they did ofen try to hurt people from other countries, often successfully. And sometimes, no doubt, they died heroically.



We have, of course, our own Yasukuni Shrine in the US, and similar things could be said:

The vast majority of the dead commemorated in US wars were somebody's children in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps drunken with nationaist idealism, but who, in another time and place, would hardly hurt a fly. But they did try to hurt people from other countries, often successfully. And sometimes, no doubt, they died heroically.





We can best remember the dead and honor them not by tying little flags to our cars, having picnics and barbecues and shopping sprees, but by actively practicing peace and wisdom, and understanding the causes and circumstances in which people from all countries fought and died, and attempting to see that those conditions that gave rise to such bloody bellicosity do not arise again. Those conditions still exist today; can we use them to cultivate wisdom, generosity and kindness, and thereby extinguish the desire for violence?



Read more...

  | ¶ 3:33 AM

  Speaking of epistemology, here's Michelle Malkin on the koran abuse... Well, at least she responded here.

It should be obvious to anyone who so much as glances at the documents being cited that the FBI was reporting the statements of detainees rather than endorsing or validating those allegations. Immediately before describing the Koran-in-the-toilet allegation, the FBI notes the detainee's statement that "God tells Muslims to do a jihad against non-Muslims." Does Kos expect us to believe the FBI is endorsing that statement too?

Many detainees have made allegations of serious physical abuse as well as mistreatment of the Koran. Notwithstanding the MSM's "flood the zone" coverage, that's neither unexpected nor particularly newsworthy.

Are the detainees' complaints valid? Maybe some are. But the FBI documents heralded by Kos and others as evidence of abuse actually show that a significant number of detainees' complaints were either exaggerated or completely fabricated.

One detainee who claimed to have been "beaten, spit upon and treated worse than a dog" could not provide a single detail pertaining to mistreatment by U.S. military personnel. Another detainee claimed that guards were physically abusive and told detainees that U.S. soldiers were having sex with the detainees' mothers. Yet this detainee said he had neither seen any physical abuse nor heard these comments from the guards...

• Is she saying, "Don't believe them, they're Muslims?" It seems that way.
• The construction fallacy is rampant here (A is contained in B implies that if A is false, B is false).
• The "blame the victim" mentality also seems pretty evident in Malkin's screed.

She does say read the FBI reports though. On that, at least, I can agree. But my reading of those documents shows pretty damning evidence that troops calling themselves from the US have been been engaging in the kind of actions we Americans and human rights groups have deplored for decades.  | ¶ 9:21 AM

  Why folks oppose the religious right

link

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion...

The parents' Wiccan beliefs came to Bradford's attention in a confidential report prepared by the Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which provides recommendations to the court on child custody and visitation rights. Jones' son attends a local Catholic school.

"There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages," the bureau said in its report.

But Jones, 37, Indianapolis, disputes the bureau's findings, saying he attended Bishop Chatard High School in Indianapolis as a non-Christian.

Really, this judge hasn't a clue as to what goes on in the minds of kids who actually go to Catholic schools, or how they teach.

At least when I went to one, they were pretty open in discussion about other belief systems; but regardless, if the parents can't expose their kids to a variety of thought about who they are and why there here and what they should do, what kind of parents are they?

While I have my own issues with Wicca, I would no more deny anyone the right to practice it than I would deny Christians the right to pray to the Christian deity.

I sent my pre-schooler to an Christian pre-school for a few months until my wife finally realized that the Montessori school was better as a pre-school, and therefore was worth the higher tuition. I don't regret my son's exposure there; and am fascinated by how he responded to being raised in a Buddhist household and what he experienced there. People have to respond sooner or later to this: people have different religious practices or none at all. The alternative is to deny everyone the right to have this response, and that's simply a denial of human experience.


HT: Atrios.


  | ¶ 6:41 AM

  Not Nihilism Not Gnossis
I often use Joe Carter's Evangelical Outpost as fodder for my blogging, mostly because of its accessibility. I suppose if some other leading lights in his worldview blogged and did a back and forth, I'd respond to them, as well, as I sometimes do with William Dembski.

Today's post by Carter on epistemology merits a Buddhist response.

When we trust in our own reason we either become dogmatic or skeptical. But when we set aside our self-idolotry and seek true epistemic humility by listening to God we find that knowledge comes from outside us. Ontology precedes epistemology...

Christ is ontologically prior to all of Creation. We only know any truths because he exists. Christians can justifiably be skeptical about many things. But for us to ever question the existence of God is not epistemic humility but epistemic nihilism. For it to be conceivable that God does not exist would require that something exists ontologically prior to our ability to doubt. To think that God might not exist would mean that we are gods...

Now there's so much in here to question from a Buddhist perspective: Us...god(s)...faith... doubt..., but the real issue, I think is the juxtaposition of of nihilism to Carter's Christian alternative (by no means the only one, as he readily admits), and the denigration of dbout. Heck there's much to dispute from a Christian perspective, but I only have a small bit of time...

Read more...


It's often said, "Great faith and great dobut lead to great enlightenment. Little faith and little doubt lead to little enlightenment. Having neither faith nor doubt leads to no enlightenment."

With a strong degree of faith and doubt, as well as a large degree of determination, eventually we will, through experienced mindful practice, see things as they are: that it is our lot to live moment to moment in a bag of skin one day closer to death, with minds that change from moment to moment.

This is therefore not nihilism- the doctrine that nothing can be known. It is not gnossis either, not in the sense that "we are one with the universe now and forever and will never change." When experienced it does indeed shake the heavens and move the earth, as well as provide the confidence for going on in this crazy, mixed-up world.

This- to this Buddhist at least- is one reason why I'm not a Christian: when the core of our existence is experienced - as emptiness (so "core" is a deliberately chosen misnomer)- the idea that one needs a deity to center everything and make everything true is simply not necessary.

We have what we need right here right now. We are no more gods than we have need of a god. Just this. It is hardy met with, even in hundreds of thousands of millions of eons. But we now can see this; listen to this; accept and hold this. By actively being and using this, we can realize this Tathagata's true meaning.

But that true meaning is "is-ed"; we don't become rocks.

So while folks with Carter's brand of Christianity try clinging for Christ, Buddhists "be" ("to be" is such a poor verb in English- in standard English there is no way to express an active, transitive form of existence that is not the same as a simple identity) Buddha nature. The fact that it is useful, that it can make positive results in terms of magnifying generosity, wisdom and compassion to me is far more important than any attempts by a few Christian theologians to superimpose a thought structure on the whole thing, because I've got things that need doing while I breathe.




  | ¶ 6:13 AM

  Koran- Toilet..yet again


Link
War (chicken)hawks lied, people died.

WASHINGTON - Terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just four months after the first detainees arrived, that military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran, declassified
FBI records say.

"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent in July 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."

The statements about guards disrespecting the Quran echo public allegations made many months later by some detainees and their lawyers after prisoners' release from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The once-secret FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and are the first indication that Justice and Defense department officials were aware in early 2002 that detainees were accusing their guards of mistreating the holy book.

Separately on Wednesday, Amnesty International urged the United States to shut down the prison, calling it "the gulag of our time." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the human rights group's complaints were "unsupported by the facts" and that allegations of mistreatment were being investigated.

Pentagon officials have said recently that the public claims by released detainees were not credible and that the terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay had been trained to make such false claims.

But ...umm... I have a question.

It's been bothering me ever since the Newsweek flap.

The Koran's kind of a pretty extensive book. I would imagine at Guantanamo Bay, they have similar- or worse 1gpf (gallon per flush) toilets as in my home.

To flush the thing down a toilet- religious sensibilities aside, would require, I'd think, stopping up the toilet unless you ripped it into little bitty pieces, which I suspect did not happen.

So, I suspect it wasn't actually flushed all the way down the toilet, but it did get the toilet stopped up.

Which, to me, is far more troublesome, even taking religious sensibilities into account.

Do we really need "interrogators" stopping up toilets to make some kind of incoherent point?

On our tax dollar?

What kind of really neat intel did they get out of that stunt?

Probably none, but, yeah, they pissed off a whole bunch of Muslims.

Update:

Can't wait to see how the righties twist and spin this one...

Not to mention of course, that everybody since backed off the "Newsweek caused the riot" meme, including Scotty McClellan.





  | ¶ 1:37 PM

  Religious violence? All major religions?


This article in the Christian Science Monitor tries to balance out the recent Mulsim violence with Christian, Buddhist, Jewish violence counterexamples...

Last week conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe looked at this "dark side of the force" as he saw it manifested in recent events. Jacoby asked an important question: why are we so upset with reports that Newsweek printed a short piece about the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo, but not at the reaction in Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 16 people?...

(Then again, both Afghanistan president Harmid Karzai and General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, denied the riots had been prompted by the Newsweek article, calling them instead “a political act against Afghanistan's stability.” Karzai said Monday that "we know who did this" and it wasn't connected to the Koran article.)

But then Jacoby writes that this kind of reaction to a perceived slight is one reason why Muslims are so disrespected in the West - violence, it seems to Jacoby, is second nature to Muslims and to Islam, but not to other religions.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain.

The above paragraph makes an interesting point. There's only one problem with it - it's wrong..,

The author of the above, Tom Regan, than goes on to cite examples of such violence, namely among the Irish in Ireland, and between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government- the latter being an example of Buddhist/Hindu violence.

Neglecting the fact that these happen to be examples of political liberationn movements, not primarily religious disputes (of which the same could be said for Muslim/Christian/Jewish violence examples given) it can be said that merely calling one's self a member of a religious group should not, in and of itself, define the tenets of the religion, although naturally it colors another religions' followers' view of that religion.

In Buddhism, caveat emptor is pretty much a tenet of the religion- rely on yourself the Buddha said.

Regan goes on to cite a Beliefnet article on this subject, but seems to entirely miss the point.

The pathology of religious violence is aided and abetted and enabled by political impotence, plain and simple.

Addressing political impotence- yes, impotence- of those who have been disenfranchised, even those righties in the US- will do much more to smother the flames of resentment that lead to violence than it will to either appease them or outright oppose them.


  | ¶ 8:36 AM

  It's about time we apprehended 501(c) 3 bandits like Dobson.
Or, I should say, "possible" bandits. I've said it before, but finally this issue, at least on Kos, is getting the attention it deserves.

Most Buddhist temples, in the US at least, have strict separation of their fundraising activities from the temple activities itself.

I've contacted them with the following:

Where is the IRS filing from Focus on the Family, and how can I view it?

I'd like to know how this group retains its tax-exempt status, given the massive amount of political content on the website.

I'll be posting your response on my blog, and linking to major blogs that reach over 1/2 million, so a timely and honest response would be well appreciated.

See the next post for the types of things that these folks don't want discussed.

  | ¶ 6:07 AM

  "Overcoming Faith" doesn't apply to deaf people.




Link

Although they say, "Deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement, and is
the privilege of all believers (Isaiah 53:4, Matthew 8:16, 17)," one wonders how come they don't want deaf people to know what they're saying.

1. Cathedral submitted a petition for exemption requesting a waiver from compliance with the captioning requirements. It asserts that the program “Overcoming Faith Television” is a locally produced and distributed non-news program with no repeat value, pursuant to Section 79.1(d)(8) of the Commission’s rules. However, the Commission intended that the exemption for locally produced and distributed non-news programming with limited repeat value be a narrowly focused exemption. It is intended to apply only to a limited class of truly local materials, including, for example, local parades, local high school and other nonprofessional sports, live unscripted local talk shows and community theatre productions. Moreover, the Commission concluded that the programming in question would have to be locally created and not networked outside of the local service area or market of a broadcast station. Cathedral fails to explain or provide support for its contention that the scope of its program relates only to local issues and that the program is truly local in nature. In addition, because Cathedral provides no information on the extent of distribution of its program, it is difficult to determine whether Petitioner’s programming reaches beyond its locale. Therefore, because Cathedral has failed to provide sufficient information, we are unable to determine whether the Section 79.1(d)(8) exemption applies here. However, the option of an undue burden exemption still remains available if Petitioner makes the proper showing.
2. Section 79.1(f) requires a petition for exemption from the closed captioning requirements to demonstrate that compliance would cause significant difficulty or expense. Cathedral’s petition, however, fails to disclose detailed information regarding finances and assets, gross or net proceeds, or sponsorships solicited for assisting in captioning. Cathedral provided no documentation from which its financial condition can be assessed. Although Cathedral indicates that it “is not funded or granted in any way by outside sources”, without documentation, it is impossible for the Commission to determine whether Cathedral has sufficient justification supporting an exemption from the closed captioning requirements for its television program. Our decision herein is without prejudice to Cathedral bringing a future petition for exemption that adequately documents that the Section 79.1(d)(8) exemption is applicable to “Overcoming Faith Television” or that compliance with our rules will impose an undue burden. Implicit in the Section 79.1(f) requirement of a showing as to the financial resources of a petitioner, such as Cathedral, is the question of the extent to which the distributors of its programming can be called upon to contribute towards the captioning expense. Thus, any subsequent petition should document whether Cathedral solicited captioning assistance from the distributors of its programming and the response to these solicitations. Absent such a petition, Petitioner is given 3 months from the release date of this Order to come into complete compliance with the rules.

Ouch. That financial bit must sting a little.

For some reason, the Living Word Bible Church has the same problem.


  | ¶ 9:29 PM

  Finally! A 2nd Ed. of "War"


If you are not familiar with this book, you should be. And now that it's in print again, it's required reading.

Terrorism, writes Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer, is a hangnail. A distraction. The thing to worry about is war. "All the major states are still organized for war," he writes. They have weapons we don't want to think about.

"War: The Lethal Custom" is a rewrite of a book Dyer wrote 20 years ago, when President Reagan faced Soviet Premier Gorbachev across the negotiating table in Iceland. Today's context is different: America is unchallenged — for the moment. But history and anthropology give us little comfort...

His political conclusion is well argued but more speculative than the other parts of this book. Here Dyer posits that what could bring on a major war is the itch by middling states for greatness, and their desire to even their odds with nuclear weapons.

Dyer's solution is to give enforcement authority, and an army, to the United Nations — not authority to govern but to guarantee international frontiers. For big countries to accept this will be a hard sell, he says; there is no demand for it from their people, and much suspicion. Further, he admits, the suspicion is justified. "Nationalists of all countries are quite right to worry about what a powerful United Nations might mean."

But in a world in which certain weapons simply cannot be used, he asks, what is the alternative? He doesn't really consider any, which is a weakness as a political book. But as an interpretive history of war, "War: The Lethal Custom" is brilliant.

  | ¶ 7:07 AM

  Why the judicial deal is a win for Democrats
This Kos diary says it all.

But this had to be: ever since the Terri Schiavo fiasco, it's been apparent even to Bush that Americans really don't want a theocracy. That's why he's been back-pedaling ever since.

And religious right folks you should see the obvious: it's not because they're against abortion, but because they're against consumers and against indivudual liberty. Either you or they will spit the other one out like a cherry stone if you have no further need of them or if they have no further need of you.


  | ¶ 5:28 AM

  Template Changes, and welcome to Blogmandu & Buddhistblogs digest


Thomas Chen's blog is gone, alas.

Shokai has renamed his blog.

And a big welcome, 合掌 (gassho, or palms together) to Blogmandu. Tom Armstrong has done far more to poke around in the Buddhablogosphere than I've had time to do.

Great work.

And there's Buddhistblogs digest.

The Buddblogosphere's much bigger than it was when I started out almost one year ago.



  | ¶ 5:08 AM

  Pascal's Wager and Gambler's Ruin
Blaise Pascal was undoubtedly one of the more influential figures in the history of science and mathematics. I have been continually professionally and recreationally indebted to him, so to speak, for his work in probability, especially for the optimality of bold play when the game is less than favorable.

Bold play, for those who don't want to wade through the equations at the link (but should, especially if they have friends who go to casinos) is a strategy in which the gambler a) has a goal, and b) bets either his entire fortune, or the difference in his fortune + the goal and his fortune at each trial. It can be shown (see references above) that, compared to timid play (a gambler betting one unit of a fortune until his target is reached) bold play works much better. In fact, timid play is a disaster.

This in real life produces some amusing experiences in casinos when practiced: if you go into a casino with $200, and look to make $20 (the cost of the real cheap meal for 2 at these places generally), you'll spend about 15 minutes or so in the casino until you win that little amount most of the time, or you'll lose $200 a small percentage of the time. (But you will of course lose that money eventually. It's an unfair game after all.)

Pascal is also famous for saying that philosophy is "not worth an hour's trouble," which brings him even nearer to my heart. But, unfortunately, sometimes he didn't take his own advice, and at one such time, cooked up Pascal's Wager.

Read more...


And so Joe Carter plays with Pascal's Wager today.

Now the main criticism I, and many others have with Pascal's Wager is its inherent insincerity and appeal to selfishness: even if you have grave doubts about the existence of a (Christian) deity, you should pretend that you don't have those doubts because it's in your selfish interest to do so.

Unlike gambling in a casino (where there is no pretense that it is anything other than a quid pro quo for your time and money versus a likelihood that you might win some money sometimes if you're not a degenerate gambler) this is not recreational, but is theoretically to inform the interstices of the most subtle aspects of your entire life. So the gambling metaphor falls apart unless you realize that the stakes are pretty important.



Which gets me back to Carter:

But how can we determine what is more likely when applied to an issue such as the ontological status of God? That is the question British theoretical physicist Stephen Urwin attempts to answer in his book, The Probability of God.

By applying Bayesian probabilities, a statistical method devised by 18th-century Presbyterian minister and mathematician Thomas Bayes, Urwin attempts to determine the probability of God’s existence. Since 50-50 represents “maximum ignorance”, Unwin begins with a 50 percent probability that God exists and then applies it to the following modified Bayesian theorem:

The probability of God's existence after the evidence is considered is a function of the probability before times D ("Divine Indicator Scale"):

10 indicates the evidence is 10 times as likely to be produced if God exists
2 is two times as likely if God exists
1 is neutral
0.5 is moderately more likely if God does not exist
0.1 is much more likely if God does not exist

Unwin then uses the following lines of evidence and applies his own, admittedly subjective, figures for their likelihood:

Recognition of goodness (D = 10)
Existence of moral evil (D = 0.5)
Existence of natural evil (D = 0.1)
Intra-natural miracles (e.g., a friend recovers from an illness after you have prayed for him) (D = 2)
Extra-natural miracles (e.g., someone who is dead is brought back to life) (D = 1)
Religious experiences (D = 2)

Plugging these figures into the above formula (in sequence, where the P after figure for the first computation is used for the P before figure in the second computation, and so on for all six Ds), Unwin arrives at the conclusion that the probability that God exists is 67%.

Another problem I have with this is how it has, um, left out a few things.

Let

a = altruistic behavior observed in other beings who are not monotheists (= 0.02)

b= bad behavior and an absence of
metanoia (“repentance” or a true turning away) seen in followers of a given monotheistic religion for which there is an apologetic. (= 0.1)


W= alternative explanations for the world as seen by Buddhists, Taoists, Jains, naturalists, behaviorists, and any permutation of positions thereof which dilutes a given apologetic explanation (= 0.00001)


Then subsuming these values into D above gives a value "for the probability of God existing" that is rather small. Which is what we expect: there's no lifeboat coming to save us. Even Pascal's look at the stars at night told him he was alone, and that exercises like this were to no avail. His solution: stupefy yourselves and "take holy water." Plunge into the Catholic faith, he advised. Apologetics was bunk.



So, in this bit of exercise on my ability to use Blogger to post in Symbol font (not entirely a useless exercise therefore) we've shown why Pascal's Wager doesn't really work. It is a useful tool, though to illustrate dukkha, precisely because of its ultimate impotence. Oh, and Firefox doesn't do Symbol fonts by default for some odd reason...


To a Buddhist, therefore, this illustrates its own insufficiency and our own discomfort. And, (2nd Noble Truth) there's a reason for that: we are attached to the idea that somehow we're entitled to know what happens after death, and furthermore, we're somehow entitled to game the system (I so rarely get a chance to use that metaphor) in such a way as to get something of infinite value after we die. But of course, once we become nonattached to the notion of what happens after we die and what magic words we need to say or deeds we need to do to prevent the rot and decay of our physical bodies from impeding a soul's transit to some happy place, we can actually begin to do something useful.

And so it is with this post: there's garbage to take out before my zazen.







  | ¶ 3:58 AM

  My gut was right...


The filibuster for judges lives.


  | ¶ 4:49 PM

  The New Yorker sort of gets it on Dembski


Link

The most serious problem in Dembski’s account involves specified complexity. Organisms aren’t trying to match any “independently given pattern”: evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn’t trying to get anywhere. If building a sophisticated structure like an eye increases the number of children produced, evolution may well build an eye. But if destroying a sophisticated structure like the eye increases the number of children produced, evolution will just as happily destroy the eye. Species of fish and crustaceans that have moved into the total darkness of caves, where eyes are both unnecessary and costly, often have degenerate eyes, or eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin—crazy contraptions that no intelligent agent would design. Despite all the loose talk about design and machines, organisms aren’t striving to realize some engineer’s blueprint; they’re striving (if they can be said to strive at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.

Another problem with Dembski’s arguments concerns the N.F.L. theorems. Recent work shows that these theorems don’t hold in the case of co-evolution, when two or more species evolve in response to one another. And most evolution is surely co-evolution. Organisms do not spend most of their time adapting to rocks; they are perpetually challenged by, and adapting to, a rapidly changing suite of viruses, parasites, predators, and prey. A theorem that doesn’t apply to these situations is a theorem whose relevance to biology is unclear. As it happens, David Wolpert, one of the authors of the N.F.L. theorems, recently denounced Dembski’s use of those theorems as “fatally informal and imprecise.” Dembski’s apparent response has been a tactical retreat. In 2002, Dembski triumphantly proclaimed, “The No Free Lunch theorems dash any hope of generating specified complexity via evolutionary algorithms.” Now he says, “I certainly never argued that the N.F.L. theorems provide a direct refutation of Darwinism.”

Those of us who have argued with I.D. in the past are used to such shifts of emphasis. But it’s striking that Dembski’s views on the history of life contradict Behe’s. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell, Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D. routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often major differences of opinion. In the end, it’s hard to view intelligent design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.

It’s also hard to view it as a real research program. Though people often picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has produced countless important experiments (let’s re-create a natural species in the lab—yes, that’s been done) and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that’s why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics.

And yeah, that's because metaphysics isn't science.

  | ¶ 2:46 PM

  Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

At least that's what I thought of as I read these accolades to the Great Helmsman...

Cou: Though I was born in the 80th, I cherish great admiration for Mao Zedong. What I can not understand is that most of my classmates have a negative attitude towards Mao. I assume it’s not because they have little knowledge of Mao, but because they are taught to be critical of him. I think no matter how history is viewed and assessed, Mao’s contributions and merits cannot be underestimated.

zhl26: In commemoration of Chairman Mao, we should study his thought, learn from the way he governed the country and to cultivate deep feelings for ordinary people.

Fuyu: Why do we commemorate Mao Zedong? Because he was the backbone of the Chinese people.

jjg: My father and grandfather were wronged and persecuted for 5 and 20 years, respectively. But I still think that Mao's merits outweigh his demerits….We can never forget that he helped lay the foundation for the growth of the People’s Republic of China.

Tttvmxl: Mao Zedong turned a brand new page in China's history….We should tell our children about the great forefathers that changed history.

nanhai007: In Mao's times, there were a few corrupt officials and social security was so good that people could sleep with doors unbolted—It is only Mao who could enable people to have the sense of security.

Iamcrazy: It's inappropriate to worship a person without a good understanding of him, including his mistakes.

Iamcrazy: Whoever enables the Chinese people to have enough to eat, people will remember him.

  | ¶ 2:06 PM

  Irony alert from Hugh Hewitt


I just caught this one...

What's missing from [Indra Nooyi's apology for I don't really know what]? How about any positive statement about what America does for the world, from liberating Afghanistan and Iraq to billions in tsunami relief? How about pouring AIDs relief into Africa and sending products, services, technology and trade around the globe....

Liberating Afghanistan like at Bagram no? Iraq like Abu Ghraib? And tsunami relief only after the rest of the world ponied up? And yeah, not only "sending products, services, technology and trade around the globe," but American jobs, too!

What a patriot that Hugh is...


  | ¶ 11:50 AM

  Alan Greenspan is concerned about the housing market


link

"Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern," Mr. Greenspan told the Economic Club of New York at the Hilton New York hotel in Midtown.

Mr. Greenspan emphasized that he sees no sign of a nationwide housing bubble, but he acknowledged concerns over "froth" in the market and pointed to a big increase in speculation in homes - particularly in second homes. As a result, he said, there are "a lot of local bubbles" around the country.

The comments of the Fed chairman were the closest he has come to acknowledging the possibility that housing prices may be poised for a fall in some parts of the country.

The issue is sensitive for the Federal Reserve, because its policy of keeping interest rates low has helped propel housing prices upward even when the rest of the economy was dragging.

Local bubbles? Really Al? Ya think so? No kidding?

These "local" bubbles of course are concentrated where, um, people actually live. And I might add, in blue states or near blue states.

So yeah, maybe there's not a bubble in rural Wyoming, but who cares?


  | ¶ 7:45 AM

  My gut is still telling me the same thing on the filibuster

From the NYT today...

In a speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Specter, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made an impassioned call for a deal to avoid the rule change, commonly known as the "nuclear option," warning that it could "do substantial damage to the institution."

The negotiations among senators from both parties center on a possible agreement for six Republicans to forswear the rule change in exchange for six Democrats agreeing to filibuster judicial nominees only in "extraordinary circumstances." Six senators from each party together have enough votes to block both moves, but the meaning of "extraordinary circumstances" is a big sticking point...

Mr. Specter joined 17 other Republicans in filing a motion to end debate on Justice Owen's nomination. In an interview, he said that he remained uncommitted either way. "I haven't said how I am going to vote, and I don't intend to," he said.

Mr. Specter indicated that he was being circumspect so that Dr. Frist and Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, both have an incentive to bargain. "I think it is very important that neither leader knows how the vote is going to turn out."

Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and a Senate elder, is working with Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and the longest-serving member of the chamber, on a plan to designate for the president a pool of qualified judicial candidates who might win confirmation more easily.

Frist knows he doesn't know he has the votes, and is still going ahead with this. That means that he, himself, sees this as a win-win: even if he loses, he gets enormous prestige from the folks who opened their purses for D. James Kennedy's Roy Moore fundraising stunt.

Which means that, for all intents and purposes, it's more likely to fail than not fail.

Note though that they're focusing in on the right issue with the pool of candidates: the filibuster exists precisely as a check on the Executive branch's possible (and in the Bush case actual) failure to heed the Senate's advice. That to me also says, the filibuster for judges ain't going away.


  | ¶ 6:46 AM

  In case you forgot about those judges Bush likes so much
Salon has it all summarized in one place, without the extensive information from People for the American Way.

There's a couple of points that need to be hammered home:

1. Priscilla Owen is more corrupt by orders of magnitude than anything that was alleged against Abe Fortas. Actually, Conason nailed that:

Ethical standards seem to have declined considerably over the past four decades -- at least among Republican senators and their preferred nominees for the federal bench. What compromised the late Fortas to an unacceptable degree now looks quaintly innocent compared with the record of Priscilla Owen, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies and lawyers with cases in her court -- and issued rulings favorable to them on many, many occasions....

...Among the most notorious examples is a case in which Owen wrote the majority opinion that allowed Enron Corp. to escape more than $200,000 in school district taxes. In her 1994 campaign, she took $8,600 from the Houston energy firm and $31,550 from its lawyers at the powerhouse firm of Vinson & Elkins; her consultant Rove also worked for Enron. Two years later, when Spring Independent School District vs. Enron reached her court, she did not recuse herself from the case. Her opinion allowed Enron to choose its own method for valuation, cutting the taxable property assessment by millions of dollars...

...One of her better-known dissents came in a case that tested the constitutionality of a state law that had been written specifically to exempt a land developer from the city of Austin's water quality regulations.

Having taken $2,500 from that developer (and an additional $45,000 from the developer's law firm), Owen blasted her colleagues for violating the firm's "property rights," which included the right to foul the water supply in her view. The majority replied that her dissent was "nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric and thus merits no response."

So Owens' ethical standards are reminiscent of raw sewage.

2. Janice Rogers Brown is a member of the Federalist Society. Most importantly, she is viscerally opposed to, it seems, any reasonable regulation of private enterprise. So she's anti-consumer.


  | ¶ 5:47 PM

  What would happen if it really were "government by Enron?"
To be honest, usually when I see diaries on Kos about economics, about 40% of the time, I half expect to see some uneducated rant. This one today, which intimates that Krugman's not giving us the awful truth on China started off that way. And it may still be that way... But then I got to thinking, especially after reading the quoted parts and an updated quote.

These are the same folks who lied to us about Iraq. I still think, for now, at least, that the above linked Kos diary is tin foil hat stuff- that is, I can think of reasons why the governments might legitimately restate asset reserves; FOREX and derivatives of FOREX are not completely regulated markets, for example, and why all transactions have to be reported, I would guess the nature of the transactions is pretty much whatever the individual/corporate entitites involved in the transaction can get. The reporting doesn't have to be immediate. Corporations and private banks can and do use FOREX forward contracts. Somehow, when I buy foreign securities, money has to be exchanged and accounts settled, and how it gets reported I do not know.

Still, a corrupt government could certainly cook books on debt securities exchanges, and if it did so, would be the quickest way to "starve the beast" by completely undermining the "full faith and credit" of the United States of America.

And that would be Latin America at home.

These are the pals of Kenny boy Lay. At the head is a guy who likely violated securities laws but was a Bush and so therefore it didn't count. I wouldn't be surprised, but I still need more proof.


  | ¶ 6:19 AM

  Here's something you don't see nowadays...





Republican Calvin Coolidge being endorsed by none other than labor organizer Mother Jones.

Ah, those were probably the days...geez, today's Republicans would be endorsed by I don't have a faintest clue...


  | ¶ 10:42 PM

  To all you people who criticized Newsweek.


Somehow, trying to pile on Newsweek to try to keep the real stories of abuse getting out is simply sick and perverted. Like this:

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time...

The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been pulpified."

"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time...

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.

"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem."

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.

"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive."

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

No matter how many times you yelp about Newsweek, you will never justify garbage like this. Never. If you are not crying out against this with at least the same fervor you went after Newsweek, then you are not Americans; you're enemies of America. And your attempting to gloss over things like this is making more enemies of America.

So I respectfully say to you: work for al Qaeda, for Chrissakes. We don't need you here. Bring Santorum with you.

  | ¶ 9:59 PM

  A folksy, winsome, homespun tale from James Dobson
Link

...In the absence of intellectual arguments with which to counter the rational positions put forward by thoughtful conservatives, they ["liberals in the media" apparently] have increasingly reverted to name calling. I have good reason to understand how those verbal assaults play out. Never in my 30 years as an author and broadcaster have I been subjected to such viciousness...

"Extremist" is a favorite pejorative when referring to conservatives, and especially Evangelical Christians. It means someone who is dangerous and radically different from all the normal people...

Stop right there, Jimmy...it's not like your posse's never used the term. Like here. Or here. Or...

These are some of the recent assaults on me and my colleagues at Focus on the Family:

· Don Imus, of MSNBC, called me "half a nut," "a jerk," "a pinhead" and a private part of human anatomy. Then he said, "I would like to challenge Dr. James Dobson to a fist fight. I will whip his a--." How's that for immature dialogue from a 65-year-old man? Imus' response is straight out of junior high school.

· Two weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore said in a speech to Move On.Org that FRC President Tony Perkins and I were part of an "aggressive new strain" and a "virulent faction" of fundamentalists, which is the wording one would use to describe disease-carrying viruses and bacteria. We note that Mr. Gore couldn't think of any particular behavior that associated us with germs, but that didn't keep him from making the connection.

· Last week, the leftist religious organization Interfaith Alliance, got down and dirty. One of its Board members, a United Methodist minister named Rev. Bill Kirtin, referred to me and Focus on the Family as "the Gestapo." When questioned about the severity of the comment, he replied, "I said Gestapo and I meant it." Rev. Peter Morales, head of the public policy commission for the Interfaith Alliance, said, referring to us, "these are the actions of an American Taliban, or reactionary religious zealots." Remember that the Gestapo was the Nazi killing machine which murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles in cold blood; the Taliban blew up the World Trade Center Building in New York and killed nearly 3000 innocent men, women, and children. According to the Interfaith Alliance, we are as evil as these two of the most murderous political entities in world history. This, mind you, comes from a religious organization that hopes to be taken seriously.

· Last Friday, the rhetoric of murder became more specific. Lewis H. Lapham of Harper's Magazine wrote, "Pastor Dobson apparently endorses political candidates who favor the execution of homosexuals and of doctors who provide abortions. I don't think they're joking." Doesn't such a breath-taking allegation as this demand documentation of some sort? Aren't Lapham and the publishers of Harper's Magazine obligated by journalistic ethics to document such a claim? Apparently not! I'm not a pastor, and almost everything I've ever said publicly is still in the record. Surely, there must be one quotation somewhere in my tapes or books that would validate this claim. The fact is, none exists. Their outrageous accusation is like a hot-headed nine-year-old claiming the other is named "Hitler."

Be sure to send a nice "thank you" to Imus, Gore, Lapham and the IA.

I wouldn't have used "Gestapo," btw. "SS" comes closer to it. They were, after all, themselves modelled on the Jesuits. (Yeah, I wouldn't actually use either words, because the stakes are too great.) But Jimmy boy, why not distance yourself from David Duke's supporters by distancing yourself from former Psycho star Tony Perkins rather than whining? Not to mention denouncing folks like Neal Horsley (try here for more info) with something at least as audible as a whinny.



  | ¶ 2:10 PM

  Get ready for the coffee crisis
link

It turns out coffee is the 2nd most traded commodity...after petroleum.

Looks like today's a good buying opportunity, though.

Newseek lied! Terri Schiavo! Michael Jackson! Activist judges!

I do wish people would focus.


  | ¶ 8:54 AM

  What my gut tells me about the filibuster

It's a standard tactic with the religious right, folks, it was done in Roy Moore's case: mount a loud and noisy struggle over a losing issue, and then use direct mail fund-raising and TV "religious" appeals to rake in the cash.

It was the Terri Schiavo show, too.

I predict this is going down.


  | ¶ 6:57 AM

  More on acupuncture...





Yesterday I went to an excellent acupuncturist to deal with some tendonitis I seem to have picked up due to stress and over-enthusiasm at the gym.

I had been to an acupuncturist two times before, for colds. One of them had gone on literally for a month; with the acupuncture & herbs it was cleared up in three days.

The experience for the type of pain I had was quite different. I'm amused, by the way at one of my commenters on my post below who thought - perhaps due to that moron Alan Alda's TV show which often praises conventional medicine - that acupuncture works because of a "placebo effect" or that it "mutilates nerves." Actually, both my commenter and Alda should realize that one of the reasons there are studies being funded in it is because some previous studies have shown that acupuncture has promise. (Update: Actually, Alda's even more idiotic than I'd remembered: modulating using the body's natural opiates and modulating them is not quite the same thing as a "placebo effect," since natural opiates obviously do the same thing as the ingested ones. And I use "idiotic" and "moron" with all due kindness towards Alda, after all, he's as liberal as they get. )

It's not. In fact, one could say that the conventional treatments such as Ben-Gay are more "placebo effect" than acupuncture. Although it is easy to scoff at the Chinese notions of "Chi" (気) involved, it is pretty easy for me to envisage why this stuff works. Unlike the simple application of Ben Gay (I wonder if my commenter knows why that works?) the message sent to the brain and nervous system from acupuncture is more complex, with, I would suppose, a more complex response from the brain/body.

Regardless, I'm amused at how people opine on this topic, even though they've never had the treatment. For this type of pain, acupuncture's effect is profound (kind of like a big psychic/proprioceptive "whack" followed by a progressive calming), and I don't understand how anyone could predict what would be experienced conincidentally with acupuncture would be a "placebo" effect. Moreover, it's easy to create a test the falsifiability of acupuncture, and so studies are being done.

Oh, and Ben-Gay works because you've basically got 4 types of nerve receptors/pathways, and the "burning sensation" receptors/pathway is the most sensitive (and travels fastest to the brain), for obvious reasons. The application of Ben-Gay and related topical remedies (not the ones containing salicylates)- hit these receptors, which in effect "jam" the other pathways. I got that from watching the medical lectures on satellite TV, instead of say, college football. Or Alan Alda. The quality of PBS is for sh*t these days.


  | ¶ 5:56 AM

  Who is the "religious right?"
The confluence of a Hugh Hewitt contest on "who is the 'religious right'" (When Maureen Dowd or Christopher Hitchens or Frank Rich or other center-left writers or politicians use the terms "Christian right" or "religious right," who do they think they are talking about and who are they talking to? And how do you define the terms and how large is that group. Statistics count, as do footnotes or sources that can be checked.) and a Carnival of the Godless is just too good to be true, if only to see from where I get the hits.

First of all, when Dowd or Hitchens or Rich says "religious right" or "Christian right" they mean different things. Hitchens is a curmudgeonly atheist who thinks all religion is bunk; I'm not sure about Dowd or Rich, but certainly, unlike Hitchens they've never written a memorable screed against Mother Teresa. But I'm in all of their audiences (although I generally tune out Dowd- I like substance with my snark). So whoever they're talking about might be different. But I'd say it's people who don't think the Bill of Rights was an entirely good idea, and generally want special rights for their group.

There's more...



The Religious Right is actually fairly easy to characterize, both as a movement and as a type of mindset. I'd identify these elements:

• Projection of their faults on their enemies. E.g., the assumed existence of a "gay agenda" masks an agenda to oppress gays. Religious "persecution" of Christians in the US? How about Christian supremacy and marginalization of minority religious views?
  
  
  
• The proliferation of groups - often astroturf groups- to ape what are seen "liberal" groups. Thus the ACLJ is the evil twin of the ACLU; CWFA is the alter ego of NOW (or at least once was). Focus on the Family's Dobson was the alternate universe Dr. (Benjamin) Spock with a beard. CFR? CNP. Get it?
  
  
• The confusion of religiousness and spirituality with capitalsim. Focus on the Family has a prime example here:
  
  

  H.B. London, Focus on the Family's vice president of Ministry Outreach, said it's just one more method a church can use to reach the un-churched.
  
  "I think the old scripture that says 'by all means win some' is a very important passage of scripture," he said, citing I Cor. 9:22, "and I ascribe to it."
  
  London said he's worried some churches are more concerned with numbers than the Gospel.
  
  "I think the churches, if they would really admit it, are trying to reach the 18 to 49-year-olds—they're trying to reach the same demographic the television and movie industry is trying to reach."
  
  Jim Mellado, president of the Willow Creek Association, said not all modern churches hold fast to the tenets of the faith, but those that do often see phenomenal results.
  
  "These are churches that have more than doubled in the last decade," he said, "and they have four times the average attendance of the average church—they have eight times the conversions."

  
  
  Market share, yeah, baby!
  
  
• Did I mention they don't like the Bill of Rights? Their leaders often wind up working with unsavory people, such as Robertson (who does get big bucks from his "flock") friends of Mobutu and the guy who ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero. Or Tony Perkins, who bought David Duke's mailing list. Or Ashcroft, who has written for Southern Partisan, put out by people who thought the Confederacy wasn't such a bad idea.
  
  
• Some of their members support terrorism: Randall Terry is one such example. Let's face it, Eric Rudolph was a member. The folks who had the "Run, Rudolph run!" signs were members. But most of all, they seem to hate the idea of religious pluralism (or lack of religion), and freedom of conscience. They recoil at the idea that you can't have freedom of religion without the ability to be free from religion.
  
  
• In terms of actual numbers, they are actually a significant minority of the population, albeit an unusually vocal one: George Barna says that all evangelicals (which he defines as born again Christians who are biblican inerrantists who think of their god as having dominion and a Protestant mindset on faith/works) comprise no more than 7% of the population of the US. Of these, the subset of them who would be Republican activists would be substantially smaller. They are actually not growing very fast, either. But there clearly is much money behind ministries associated with them, as well as with Republican politics. You don't see networks of Unitarians, even though they're growing faster than Baptists. Salem Radio. TBN. The 700 Club. These franchises are worth tens of millions of dollars. That's not chump change.
  
  
• But most of all, I would think, much of what they assert is false, whether because of being misinformed or simply dishonest. Among those untruths I know, which I'll debunk for the record:
  
  
  
  
  • Cassier Bernall didn't "say yes."
    
    
  • Terri Schiavo was effectively brain dead, unlike the tales spun about her "trying to speak."
    
    
    
  • I think the greatest untruth they tell, though, is in claimning an exclusive access to revealed truth, when it is clear that they are personally alienated from the truth most closest to them.
    
    
  • "Intelligent" "Design" is not a science, and only a demagogue or an ignorant person or huckster would say othewise.
    
    
  • The kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:12), as opposed the religious right's version, where said kingdom is realized by establishing a theocracy on earth, or at least judges and politicians who'll pander to division and hatred.
    
    
  
  
  
  

So we can say the "religious right" is a small, well funded subset of American Christians who are bent on overturning what we have traditionally thought of as the American way.

  | ¶ 3:11 PM

  Why Conservative Christians don't know how to negotiate

I was going to post on the looming Senate showdown, and how it stems from a failure of the President to have the Senate- the full Senate- advise him on potential nominees, rather than simply give an unconstitutional "consent only" as the radical Republicans want.

But instead, I go over to Carter's place, and mirabile dictu, there's a weird syncrhonicity in his superficially very different topic, raising the same old same old stalking horses against postmodernism...

I can’t recall ever meeting a true postmodernist. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met two people who could define the term in the same way. Ask a philosopher, an artist, an English major, an emergent church leader, and the pizza delivery girl how postmodernism differs from modernity. Assuming they can do more than stare blankly in befuddlement at the question, the responses will likely be at complete variance from one another.

Well, first of all, I can talk about modernism...

The deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the 20th century.

And a simple definition of postmodernism:

Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes...

Now here I need an obligatory Carter snippet or two...

All of the talk about a “hermeneutic of suspicion” and metanarratives, though, merely obfuscates the obvious: nothing substantially different has occurred...

That's probably all the Carter I need today...

Ok, folks, listen up: postmodernism is a very useful to real life. The techniques of deconstruction - which actually go back to Plato- can be found in a variety of Western philosophy, but their everyday application has been called something else by marketers, negotiators, aribtrators, lawyers, and people just trying to get along in this crazy mixed up world.

There's more...




Read Herb Cohen's "You Can Negotiate Anything," and you are reading a text on how to deconstruct for fun and profit and peace. Professional and theoretical negotiators have recognized this similarity (look around here long enough and the utility of deconstruction become quite obvious). Negotiation, in theory and practice, is nothing but postmodernism/deconstruction. It is about subverting fixed metanarratives because the alternative is often getting lots of people dead.

Ditto for real marketing: one has to subvert narratives to disrupt existing markets. Toddlers using VCRs subvert the intentions of the human factors engineers who designed their interfaces. Good human factors engineers can either utilize the toddlers' narrative to make better household devices, or simply ignore them, and imperil their company's market share.

The iPod subverts the narrative of Clear Channel.

So, as a practical matter, deconstruction is very useful.

Derrida saw this, too, evidently. It's those who are opposed to win-win agreements, who are opposed to the nuts-and-bolts practicality of peace-making, who are opposed to liberating markets ethically that have a knee-jerk reaction to "postmodernism."

As much of negotiation theory is really applied deconstruction, it is no surprise that those most opposed to useful negotiation are also those that see the least value in postmodernism. They are also those most likely to be eaten alive in the global economy.

Indeed fundamentalists and evangelicals are opposed to postmodernism for one simple reason: it is a threat to their market share, and anything that threatens their market share is a threat to their own faith, odd as it may seem.

But, like everything else, they don't quite practice what they preach: the modern evangelical service is nothing but a subversion of the traditional Christian religion, actually, both in form and in content. It is a subversion of traditional Christian experience with, um, capitalism.

But this knee-jerk reaction to postmodernism explains the Senate showdown over the filibuster: if there is power distributed (the power of the Senate to advise on nominees, and the check on failure to advise being the filibuster), the distribution has to be subverted, but the language can't reveal that subversion of power.




  | ¶ 4:20 AM

  Nice 'tude, Dembski
I read this today, and I was kind of amused at the condescension and projection oozing from Dembski's post which supports "suitably equivocating about the meaning of science so that anti-scientific people will try to confuse the public and themselves into consenting to a theory that ordinary standards of evidence rendered completely insupportable":

When interrogating Darwinists with the goal of opening up discussion in the high school biology curriculum about evolution (i.e., strengths, weaknesses, and alternatives), I therefore propose subjecting them to a sustained line of questioning about what they mean by each of these five terms: science, nature, creation, design, and evolution. In addition, it will help to keep in mind that for the purposes of interrogation, there are three types of Darwinists:

(1) The Richard Dawkins Darwinist (abbreviated RD Darwinist), who is virulently against religion of any stripe and uses evolution as a club to beat religious believers. Richard Dawkins Darwinists despise religious belief and regard religious believers as having to check their brains at the door if they are want to maintain both their faith and evolutionary theory.

(2) The Eugenie Scott Darwinist (abbreviated ES Darwinist), who is not religious in any traditional sense (in particular, this type of Darwinist does not think God does or can act in any way that makes a difference in the natural world) but at the same time thinks it is ill-advised to antagonize religious believers by using evolutionary theory as a club. The Eugenie Scott Darwinist wants to placate religious believers by assuring them that they can be good followers of their faith as well as good Darwinists.

(3) The Kenneth Miller Darwinist (abbreviated KM Darwinist), who is a traditional Judeo-Christian believer, holds that God has acted miraculously in salvation history (with such miracles as the parting of the Red Sea, the resurrection of Christ, the Virgin Birth, etc.) but denies that God’s activity in natural history is scientifically detectable. The Kenneth Miller Darwinist is an orthodox religious believer and an orthodox Darwinist. He is the poster child for the Eugenie Scott Darwinist.

The vise strategy consists in subjecting each of these types of Darwinists to a sustained line of questioning about these five key terms, questions that they have no choice but to answer (hence the “vise” metaphor). The aim of this line of questioning is to make clear to those reading or listening to the Darwinists’ testimonies that their defense of evolution and opposition to ID are prejudicial, self-contradictory, ideologically driven, and above all insupportable on the basis of the underlying science....

Thus, in regard to religion, for the RD Darwinists, the aim of the interrogation is to goad them into following the example of Rumpelstiltskin by publicly tearing themselves apart in their rage against religion. The prefect ending to such an interrogation would be for them to admit that they are Darwinists first and foremost because Darwinism is the most effective tool for destroying religion (this is the ideal — don’t expect to achieve it).

The ES and KM Darwinists, by contrast, need not so much to be antagonized or goaded as gently guided into an intellectually indefensible position regarding religious belief. Even so, the strategy for approaching these two types of Darwinists must be a bit different. The ES Darwinist wants to appear open minded and generous, assuring religious believers that Darwinism is compatible with their religious beliefs. For the ES Darwinists, the aim of the interrogation is to show that they are patronizing elitists who don’t have a religious bone in their bodies but who nonetheless presume to tell religious believers how they should make their peace with evolution.

Finally, the KM Darwinist actually does have a sincere religious faith, believing that God is the creator of the world and has acted miraculously in salvation history

(Emphasis mine to show how highly Dembski thinks of people who don't subscribe to his religious beliefs.)
It really is shocking that somebody who holds a position in academia can be frankly, such a religious bigot: the idea that somebody might be a serious Buddhist or Taoist simply does not appear on this man's radar.

We don't need to "interrogate" Dembski as to what he means by "science, nature, creation, design, and evolution." He let the cat out of the bag when he started ridiculing others' religous positions.

  | ¶ 6:36 PM

  書道: Acupuncture




link

Master Tung Ching Chang has been referred to as The Greatest Acupuncture Master who ever lived. He was a traditional Chinese physician from the Shandong Province in Northern China, famous for the miraculous and spontaneous results he would obtain using just a few needles. The points he used are unique in that they are located opposite the affected area. In most cases, the patient notices the effect immediately upon insertion of the needle.

Master Tung’s Points were a treasured family secret, handed down and refined over many generations. He moved to Taiwan on 1949. From 1953-1975, there were over 40,000 patient visits in his clinic in Taipei. Master Tung also began to teach his secret point system in Taipei. He chose all his students, 73, by himself and no any charge. Dr. Chuan-Min Wang is one of the 73 studen

This stuff works. More info here.


  | ¶ 6:38 PM

  A bit of trivia: 五点手の平の起爆心臓方法

For no particular reason other than I was bored and waiting for the weather to warm up slightly before attacking my backyard, I googled "Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique," and came up with this link.

Although it's over-done as is traditional in martial arts films, apparently there are such fatal points (use babelfish translating from Chinese) that can be hit in martial arts.

As one commenter on that blog noted, it has a lot to do with cultivating and directing the flow of 気(ki), or, as I just found out (what a dummy I am), this energy in Zen is called "jouriki," (that part I knew) which is represented as "定力" (and is pronounced "じょうりき") -that is, the "jo" part is lengthened slightly.

定力 is composed of 2 kanji/hantsu: "定" means "fixed," or determined, and "力" means "power" (as oppsed to "気" which means "energy.")


"力" is also pronounced as "chikara," or "ryouku" in other words.

So 定力 is simply then the power of being grounded when zazen is practiced.


  | ¶ 10:19 AM

  Projection
Link

DENVER -- A small sign in the Promise Keepers headquarters reads "70,000" -- the number of people the Christian men's organization needs to fill Razorback Stadium in Arkansas for one of its revivals this summer after years of dwindling attendance.

In the 1990s, tens of thousands of men crowded football stadiums across the United States to listen to the Promise Keepers' message, hoping to become better husbands, fathers and Christians. Yet by the end of the decade, the evangelical group had only a fraction of the following it once did...

At its peak in 1996, the organization drew about 1.1 million men to 22 stadium conferences nationwide. Its rally the following year in Washington drew hundreds of thousands of men for speeches, stadium-style "waves" and thundering chants of, "Dear God, I am a sinner. . . . Please forgive me and change me."...

Promise Keepers began to have financial problems when it decided to stop charging admission fees for its conventions, believing they were a deterrent. But voluntary contributions never covered the loss, and the group was forced to lay off hundreds of employees in 1998...

Rick Kingham, senior pastor of Overlake Christian Church in Redmond, Wash., said dropping attendance wasn't the Promise Keepers' problem alone.

"It's probably more of an indictment against our society, because men really are asleep, more now than I've ever seen before," Kingham said, noting Promise Keepers' 2005 theme is "The Awakening -- An Unpredictable Adventure."..

That's right: it's our fault that yet another politically right wing exclusivist religious movement as marketing stunt failed.





  | ¶ 9:51 AM

  Reclaiming Christianity vs. Reclaiming America
Via this post on Atrios, I found this post leading to this site, which should send shivers down the likes of Hugh Hewitt, Joe Carter, and their minions.

About the Christian Alliance for Progress:

The Christian Alliance for Progress is a national movement that started in Jacksonville, Florida among ordinary Americans who want to reclaim Christianity and change this current political picture. Members in the movement want to restore core values of Christianity while honoring diverse views about religion and Christian life. Many Americans, especially people of faith, are ready to hear from Christians who are tolerant, and who understand the many ways that our faiths impact our views of public life. The Christian Alliance advances a renewed, progressive vision of Gospel values and seeks to help Americans express this moral vision in our lives and in our politics.

Hmmm...reclaiming and Florida...where have I seen that before?

The CENTER FOR RECLAIMING AMERICA was founded in 1996 by Dr. D. James Kennedy, as an outreach of Coral Ridge Ministries for the purpose of mobilizing America’s Christians at the grassroots level. In July 2004, the CENTER introduced Dr. Gary Cass, a former Salt & Light Award winner, as its new Executive Director. As an ordained minister and former elected school board member, Gary brings a wealth of ministerial experience and political knowledge to the CENTER.

Since its founding, the CENTER has established a nationwide e-mail network of more than 500,000 concerned Christians. The CENTER provides non-partisan, non-denominational information, training, and support; enabling those interested to positively affect the culture and renew the vision of our Founding Fathers.

As a means to accomplish this mission, the CENTER focuses on five key fronts of the modern-day culture war: (1) Religious Liberties, (2) the Sanctity of Life, (3) the Homosexual Agenda, (4) Pornography, and (5) Promoting Creationism.

Given that to them, "Religious Liberties" means trashing the bill of rights, "Sanctity of Life" means interference in people's personal life decisions, "Pornography" doesn't include violence, and "Creationism" is well, "Creationism," I like the progressives much more.

I welcome their entry into the culture war.

Update...

I also like this bit from Rising Hegemon, but when it comes to bad comb-overs Benny Hinn takes the cake hands down...




I'd also add that anybody who's pulled the plug on a family member, or who has decided whether or not to have the plug pulled on themselves is automatically disqualified from recommending that the state refrain from any plug-pulling or plug-keeping-in on somebody else's behalf.

And finally, I'd extend the "no divorce" rule to any "family expert" parents of divorced children...obviously they did something wrong in God's eyes, right?





  | ¶ 8:42 AM

  Meanwhile, rapid temperature drop in China/Taiwan conflict
which equals nothing less than: Bush makes us even more irrelevant.

But this cannot be said to be anything other than good...

BEIJING, May 12 -- Chinese President Hu Jintao proposed new diplomatic language Thursday aimed at ending the decades-old state of hostilities between China and Taiwan, in a rare but tentative concession by a Communist leader on one of the most sensitive issues in Chinese politics.

In a joint communique issued after a two-hour meeting in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, Hu and James Soong, a Taiwanese opposition leader, endorsed a new formulation of the mainland government's long-standing position that cross-strait talks can begin only after Taiwan acknowledges it is part of "one China." Under the new language, Hu effectively agreed to open talks if Taiwan accepted the principle of "two shores, one China" while acknowledging that the two sides might differ on precisely what that term meant...

Speaking in a televised interview in Taipei hours after the announcement in Beijing, Chen swiftly rejected the new wording, saying, "China did not make any concessions. It did not come up with anything new," local news media reported.

But Chen appeared open to further discussions, reiterating plans to establish a commission to pursue cross-strait talks. Chen is widely believed to be waiting until after Taiwan holds island-wide elections Saturday before deciding whether to make Hu a counteroffer...

Chen's response will not be clear until after Saturday, when the island elects a national assembly to consider constitutional reforms. Chen's party has been slipping in the polls, and he may be worried about losing more support. "He expressed disagreement with the communique today, but he still left the door open," Sheng said.

  | ¶ 3:28 AM

  And Hugh (Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf) Hewitt wants to know "Who is the Religious Right?"
There are two articles I've come across recently, re: the filibuster, that shows pretty clearly the clear and present danger to American liberty represented by the religious right.

Hewitt, of course, is being disingenuous (I'm being unfathomably kind in that characterization), when he says things that imply the religious right is a thing of the left's imagination and nothning more, and geez, they're just mainstream "people of faith." Yeah, right...

First link up...this post which was guested from Atrios recorded what I'd wanted to yesterday, but didn't get around to it...from the Times link therein:

DENVER, May 12 -- An Air Force chaplain who complained that evangelical Christians were trying to "subvert the system" by winning converts among cadets at the Air Force Academy was removed from administrative duties last week, just as the Pentagon began an in-depth study of alleged religious intolerance among cadets and commanders at the school.

"They fired me," said Capt. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran minister who was removed as executive officer of the chaplain unit on May 4. "They said I should be angry about these outside groups who reported on the strident evangelicalism at the academy. The problem is, I agreed with those reports."...

Surveys of present and former cadets have shown that some students said they felt a heavy and sometimes offensive emphasis on evangelical Christianity, with praise for cadets who pronounce their "born-again" status and insults aimed at Jews, Roman Catholics and non-evangelical cadets.

One staff chaplain reportedly told newly arrived freshmen last summer that anyone not born again "will burn in the fires of hell."

Such slurs have been heard for decades on the campus, according to Mikey Weinstein of Albuquerque, a 1977 academy graduate who said he has repeatedly complained to the Air Force brass about the "religious pressure" on cadets. "This is not Christian versus Jew," Weinstein said. "This is the evangelical Christians against everybody else."...

And yeah, last time I checked, "God damn you" was offensive...

Morton said the cadet wing at the Air Force Academy is about 90 percent Christian. She said that group is roughly one-third Catholic, one-third mainstream Protestant and one-third evangelical. But the evangelicals have a much bigger voice among the chaplains, she said.

"The predominance of evangelical Christians reflects the chaplain corps of the Air Force overall," Morton said. "The major mainstream Protestant divinity schools are no longer sending many graduates into the armed forces. And so the concentration of evangelicals among chaplains is strong through the whole service."

Morton, 48, said that, having criticized the religious atmosphere at the academy, "I may be toast" in terms of an Air Force career. She said her next duty station is said to be a pleasant spot. "But serving in Okinawa as the most hated chaplain in the Air Force might not be so great."

Good luck to Ms. Morton...

The other link, though, which I think shows the problem even better is this.


Yeah, it's the 2000 platform of which they speak, so let's check the most recent one - the 2004 document. And yes, they still want to eliminate judicial review of civil liberties. The fascists. (More here.)  | ¶ 3:13 AM

  "No" to killing the filibuster


As I've noted previously, the filibuster according to the Senate rules is constitutional.

Removing it now would simply give the Republicans too much power, and removing it without breaking the Senate rules (IOW, the debate on the filibuster could itself be filibustered) would seem difficult.

Most Americans want the Senate to be more than a rubber stamp for the president (which is after all what the constitution indicates); now I might think differently if a Democratic president was in office after a slew of fascist judges were appointed, but the reality is, if the Repubs do this, it will bite them big time. Most Americans, when informed, soundly repudiate the extremist Republicans.

So next week's Frist-fest should be interesting, if today's reports are true. Hopefully, democracy, the rights of the minority, and the rule of law will prevail.

  | ¶ 3:43 PM

  More fun iPod facts and quirks....

• Apparently whatever error corrections software they ahve in iTunes, it's a charm: CD songs that were unplayable anywhere else, actually are playable. I've heard "It says here" by Billy Bragg for the first time in about 20 years:
  
  

  t says here that the Unions will never learn
  It says here that the economy is on the upturn
  And it says here we should be proud
  That we are free
  And our free press reflects our democracy
  
  Those braying voices on the right of the House
  Are echoed down the Street of Shame
  Where politics mix with bingo and tits
  In a strictly money and numbers game.

  
  
  
  I mean, that CD had a dent in it...it was unplayable on the 4 or 5 CD players' my wife and I have collectively owned since I bought this CD.
  
  
• One of the strangest things to me is the "most popular" songs that are downloaded from music sources appear to be exactly those that have been played on FM radio most recently. That says to me that younger people are buying this stuff; they simply have no idea what's out there. It also says, unfortunately, that people in my age group are not in the demographic for iPods, which is rather odd: who in our age group doesn't long for music that has disappeared from the airwaves?
  
  
• Penetrating glance into the obvious: Nobody is selling any 11 minute songs for 99 cents.
  
  You still have to have or by the music to hear The Doors' longer songs.
  
  

  | ¶ 5:57 AM

  Negotiate with terrorists?
I've always been interested in the subject of negotiations, both from a theoretical perspective (it includes elements of game theory, decision theory, information theory and control theory) as well as a practical perspective (like when my wife and I went shopping for an engagement ring, I was "good cop" and she was hard...)

So, in line with recent events in my workplace, I've had to do some serious negotiating. There's all kinds of resources on the web, but this one caught my eye.

Negotiating with terrorists is possible, within limits, as the articles in this issue show and explore.
Limits come initially in the distinction between absolute and contingent terrorists, and then between revolutionary and conditional absolutes and between barricaders, kidnappers and hijackers in the contingent category. Revolutionary absolutes are nonnegotiable adversaries, but even conditional absolutes are potentially negotiable and contingent terrorists actually seek negotiation. The official negotiator is faced with the task of giving a little in order to get the terrorist to give a lot, a particularly difficult imbalance to obtain given the highly committed and desperate nature of terrorists as they follow rational but highly unconventional tactics. Such
are the challenges of negotiating with terrorists that this issue of the journal explores and elucidates.

Now I don't thankfully have to do hijack negotiations; my world is much smaller and happier, even if stressed from time to time.

But adversarial negotiation is a skill that comes in quite handy: what to do when there is a trust issue is extremely important.

In that case, openness and verifiability are paramount. A maximum amount of information is also necessary.

It may seem burdensome, but it is rewarding in the end.

But I won't disagree with anyone who says that when you've got somebody threatening to kill large numbers of people, and the threat is immediate, that taking them out is not only a good tactic, but compassionate.

  | ¶ 1:01 PM

  Tail Events WILL happen
Those folks who continually lambast evolutionary biology should take a good look at this article from the NY Times:

Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110 players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right? That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five.

But from state after state they kept coming in, the one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.

It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.) ...


"We didn't sleep a lot that night," Mr. Strutt said. "Is there someone trying to cheat the system?"

He added: "We had to look at everything to do with humans: television shows, pattern plays, lottery columns."

Earlier that month, an ABC television show, "Lost," included a sequence of winning lottery numbers. The combination didn't match the Powerball numbers, though hundreds of people had played it: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. Numbers on a Powerball ticket in a recent episode of a soap opera, "The Young and the Restless," didn't match, either. Nor did the winning numbers form a pattern on the lottery grid, like a cross or a diagonal. Then the winners started arriving at lottery offices.

"Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie," said Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. "The second winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie."

Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four million a day.

"That's ours," said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a picture of a winner's cookie slip. "That's very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers."

The same number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day. The workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them. "We are not going to do the bowl anymore; we are going to have a computer," Mr. Wong said. "It's more efficient."

Now the probability of that happening is roughly 10^-11. That's a pretty rare event. But given enough tries, it will happen with with "almost certain" probability.


This basically is an example of Kolmogorov's Zero-One Law in action, which is stated succintly in Theorem 8.2 of this reference. Proofs of that rely on the Borel-Cantelli lemma.

These by the way, are not the most general statements of these theorems- in fact, independence of events is not strictly required (as a colleague of mine showed in his doctoral thesis). Only "asymptotic" independence is required (according to certain conditions).

What were folks saying about the "impossibility" of evolution?  | ¶ 9:26 AM

  The Dysfunctional Religious Leader...
link

WAYNESVILLE, North Carolina (AP) -- A Baptist preacher accused of running out nine congregants who disagreed with his Republican politics resigned Tuesday, two days after calling the issue "a great misunderstanding."...

"I am resigning with gratitude in my heart for all of you, particularly those of you who love me and my family," Chandler said, adding that the dispute was rooted in his strong feelings about abortion.

Chandler's attorney, John Pavey Jr., said the pastor has not apologized for anything he said and would continue to speak out against abortion. He said the dispute inside the church had nothing to do with politics, a contention echoed Tuesday by Chandler's supporters...

But some congregants of the 100-member church in western North Carolina have said Chandler endorsed President Bush from the pulpit during last year's presidential campaign and said that anyone who planned to vote for Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry needed to "repent or resign."

The church members said he continued to preach about politics after Bush won re-election, culminating with a church gathering last week in which the nine members said they were voted out.

At Sunday's service, the 33-year-old Chandler said the flap over the church members' dismissal was "a great misunderstanding" and he tried to welcome them back.

"No one has ever been voted from the membership of this church due to an individual's support or lack of support for a political party or candidate," he said in a statement.

It's good to see that those people recognize Chandler for what he is: a pathological liar and demagogue.

So that brings closure to this part.

Now, I wonder about those Ohio Catholic clergy who want to, er...um... protect pedophiles.

  | ¶ 6:49 AM

  Economics summary


Lots of economic news today, somewhat mixed:

• The Washington Post admits - about 4 weeks after I mentioned it- that revauluing the yuan is a mixed blessing at best:
  
  
  

  
  Some economists caution that a change in China's currency regime could boomerang on Washington. That is because under its fixed-rate system, China's central bank constantly buys billions of dollars on currency markets, which are invested in U.S. Treasury bonds and provide a major source of financing for the federal budget deficit. If the flow of money from China into the dollar and Treasury bonds were to dry up, financial turbulence might well ensue, including a sharp upward spike in interest rates.
  
  Questioning whether U.S. officials may ultimately regret prodding Beijing for a rising yuan, Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University, wrote on his Web log last month, "The first rule of good manners -- and finance as well -- is that you should not bite the hand that feeds you."
  
  Administration officials have studied the likely financial impact of a Chinese currency adjustment and view the problem as easily manageable. Many independent analysts agree, saying that unless Beijing lets its currency float completely freely -- an almost inconceivable step -- it would have to continue buying large amounts of dollars...
  
  Typically, Chinese exports -- such as DVD players, clothing and auto parts -- contain many components and raw materials that come from other countries; the value added in China often involves low-cost assembly and other labor-intensive work. In testimony at a congressional hearing last month, Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Offices, cited research indicating that China contributes only about 20 to 30 percent of the value of the average product that it ships abroad.
  
  Thus, Holtz-Eakin said, even though a rise in the yuan would increase the price of Chinese imports, "those increases would probably be much less than the appreciation of the yuan itself." For example, if the yuan rose 20 percent -- a significant appreciation -- the increase in the price of Chinese imports would probably average only about 4 to 6 percent, Holtz-Eakin said...
  
  Even if Chinese imports do rise in price and the United States buys fewer of them, that will not necessarily help shrink the U.S. trade deficit or save U.S. jobs, because imports from other countries may simply fill the gap left by China.
  
  Consider the computer and electronics industry: Imports of computers and other electronics from China have soared in the past several years, with the Chinese share of the market rising from 4.3 percent in 2000 to 11.1 percent in 2004. But as Holtz-Eakin noted in his testimony, imports' overall share of the market stayed roughly the same. The obvious implication, he said: "Imports from China were largely replacing imports from other sources."
  

  
  
  
  Nice of them to admit that bloggers know stuff before readers of the Washington Post.
  
  
• The Financial Times points out that real wages are falling in the US, quite rapidly:
  
  

  Real wages in the US are falling at their fastest rate in 14 years, according to data surveyed by the Financial Times by the Economic Policy Institute.
  
  Inflation rose 3.1 per cent in the year to March but salaries climbed just 2.4 per cent, according to the Employment Cost Index. In the final three months of 2004, real wages fell by 0.9 per cent.
  
  The last time salaries fell this steeply was at the start of 1991, when real wages declined by 1.1 per cent.

  
  
  Again, not surprising this is what you get when Republicans are in office. Except in election years, when the Fed games the system. (Somebody tell that to Kevin Drum.)
  
  
• United Airlines gets a green-light to default on its pension plan.
  
  

  The ruling releases United, a unit of the UAL Corporation, from $3.2 billion in pension obligations over the next five years. The federal agency that guarantees pensions, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, will assume responsibility for the plans, which cover about 134,000 people.
  
  Some retirees could see sharply lower pension payments as a result; others will see little change in benefits, depending on a variety of factors. Some retirees at US Airways, which has terminated its plans, have seen benefits drop by as much as 50 percent.
  
  The airline, which has been in bankruptcy protection since December 2002, has been pushing to end its pensions since losing its bid for a federal loan package last year. But unions representing United's employees fought the action, threatening to strike if the pensions were set aside.
  
  Along with raising that prospect, the action has significant implications for the airline industry, which has lost more than $30 billion since 2000, and perhaps for other industries like automobiles, with similarly heavy legacy costs.
  
  Analysts have predicted that if United won its case, there could be a domino effect as other airlines are forced to seek bankruptcy protection to bring their pension costs down to United's levels.
  
  That move would probably swamp the pension agency, which was created in 1974.

  
  
  Part of me is really scared about my own pensions, part of me is really intrigued about when to plunk some cash into United. Looks a bit early today.
  
  Finally,
  
  
• The trade deficit fell sharply in March.
  
  

  The March improvement reflected a 1.5 percent increase in exports of U.S. goods and services, which rose to an all-time high of $102.2 billion, the fourth straight monthly record. The March improvement reflected gains in a wide range of products from commercial aircraft and telecommunications equipment to farm products and art work.
  
  Imports, which had hit a record high in February, fell by 2.5 percent to $157.19 billion, reflecting a big drop in imports of foreign cars and in textile and clothing imports from China. This helped to offset a 4.1 percent increase in America's foreign oil bill, which rose 4.1 percent to $18.9 billion, the second highest level on record.
  
  The deficit with China, which has become a growing target of attack in Congress because of its position as the country with the largest trade gap with the United States, declined by 7 percent to $7.83 billion in March. The narrowing trade gap reflected in part a 21.2 percent drop in imports of clothing and textiles in March.
  
  However, Chinese imports of these products are still running 54 percent higher in the first three months of this year when compared with the same period a year ago. This reflects the surge that has occurred after global import quotas were lifted on Jan. 1...
  
  While the deficit with China was lower last month, the deficit with Japan shot up by 14.1 percent to $7.83 billion. The deficit with Canada declined by 12.5 percent to $5.05 billion but the deficit with Mexico, the other partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement, surged by 16.1 percent to $4.26 billion. The deficit with the 25-nation European Union was up 9.9 percent to $9.31 billion.
  
  The administration argues that the trade deficit primarily reflects the fact that the United States has been growing at a faster rate than much of the world, boosting our demand for imports while the demand for U.S. products has lagged.
  
  Administration officials contend that the way to compete in a global economy is to push to eliminate barriers to sales of American manufactured goods, farm products and services such as banking around the world.
  
  But critics charge that these free trade deals primarily benefit U.S. corporations who are able to shut their U.S. manufacturing plants and move production to low wage countries with free trade deals and then shipment the finished goods back to the United States duty free.
  

  
  
  
  
  

I would postulate that the fall in the trade deficit might have something to do with the fact that lower wage earners are getting squeezed.

  | ¶ 6:04 AM

  Looniness a few clicks away...
I don't get around to Sadly, No! very much; a simple click here brings me to another portal into the lunacy of the religious right.

A click there reminds me to respond to some lunacy over at Carter's place on evolution.

On the first click, going "home" there's "Renew America," not to be confused with "http://www.reclaimamerica.org."
One of the er, uh, saving graces of the religious right is that they're running out of distinguishing brand names; like drugs and automobiles their advocacy groups are going to have to start using made up words, like the "Levitramerica" or something like that.



Anyway, on "Renew America," I'm greeted by Joseph Farah's visage, and an article that takes me to Wing Nut Daily. The reason there's no witch hunt for "which judges killed Terri" was because they're all in on it!. Maybe she was already basically, uh, dead, and it wasn't judges who killed her it was her eating disorder???

But wait, there's more at that first click!

On one hand, we have moderate Christians denying that Christians kill and torture innocent people. When they are forced to admit the truth, the argument switches to, "They are not following true Christianity." The problem is this: The terrorists are following true Christianity because Christianity is founded on fear and violence.

OK. I took a few mad-liberties with the text, but if this ain't projection on the part of ...



Barbara J. Stock...(?) then I don't know what is.

The rest of her column is so out in the ozone it's breathtaking.

There's more!



Now on to Carter's abortion...uh, post.

Stealth Naturalism -- Macht from Prosthesis notes that the proposed changes to the Kansas science teaching standards includes as part of the understanding of "major concepts of biological evolution":

"Biological evolution postulates an unpredictable and unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal. It also assumes that life arose from an unguided natural process." [emphasis added]

As Alvin Plantinga and Huston Smith already pointed out to the National Association of Biology Teachers,

Science presumably doesn't address such theological questions, and isn't equipped to deal with them. How could an empirical inquiry possibly show that God was not guiding and directing evolution?

The short answer is that the folks who wrote this were either fundamentalists in disguise or incompetent. Evolution does not necessarily imply abiogenesis, although that is increasingly looking likely. In addition, the prhase "no discernable direction or goal," is misleading nonsense. There is a direction or goal locally, that is, within one or a few generations: the preservation of a maximum amount of nucleic acid components for reproduction. That, combined with mutations and ecosystem give rise to evolution.

I suspect it's a fundamentalists in disguise thing; this doesn't look like text you'd find from the folks over at Panda's Thumb.




  | ¶ 3:27 AM

  "Personalized" Stamps, eh?
link

CONSUMERS will be able to print customized stamps again starting next week, but this time they won't be able to peel and paste Monica Lewinsky's image onto a letter.

On May 17, the U.S. Postal Service will begin the second stage of a test that started last fall in which customers can print personalized postage from their computers, using their own photos.

In the earlier test, the Postal Service's vendor for the project, Stamps.com, failed to reject a handful of postage images sent to it, including photos of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the man called the Unabomber; and Nicolae Ceausescu, the former Romanian dictator.

Now that Stamps.com has tightened its screening process, investors appear to be again warming to the idea of personalized stamps, perhaps giving the online postage industry an entry into a market that has proved much more elusive than executives had once hoped.

Seems cool, doesn't it? Of course, the devil's in the details...

You agree not to use the PhotoStamps website or service:

A. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material for any unlawful purpose or that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, sexually suggestive, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, violent, or otherwise objectionable;
B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that depicts celebrities or celebrity likenesses, regional, national or international leaders or politicians, current or former world leaders, convicted criminals, or newsworthy, notorious or infamous images and individuals;...

That's too bad...I can think of lots of ideas, but they'd be rejected by these guys.
But I can think of lots of grey areas, too... e.g...



is this offensive or part of a good meal?


  | ¶ 5:50 AM

  Freedom of Music, a fundamental right

MP3 player heaven broadband internet FM radio 1970 lives again...Richie Havens High Flyin Bird' ...you pay for this but you steal that: not all of the repetoires of all musicians is even in print on MP3, but you know of it...it's not quite completely down the memory hole... we content ourselves with the three snippets of Blind Faith from iTunes and Napster, knowing, full well that there's not even a tip of the iceberg breached...I have never heard of Conor Oberst...the good stuff from Neil Young, Rust Never Sleeps, Welfare Mothers...is missing...it's gotta be here somewhere, I'm sure, just not on MP3, like Malaguena Salerosa as found in Kill Bill Vol. 2, but it is respite from the pure garbage that remains on FM radio today.

Oc-tober Project.

Music. I can at last drive to work without insipid vapid stupid banter or pseudo-serious agitation. Even Air America gets under my skin.

Goddamit, I was listening to WNEW in 1970. I friggin' know what radio can be.

I remember Paul Gorman and Mike Feder on BAI.

I remember "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" played on FM.

These guys who've done the MP3's have started to create the subversion of the media.

Don't believe squat about Rush Limabaugh, or Air America.

The world can get the hooch of real music. Not the crapola that's OK to play in Baptist churches, but the real thing, the threat, the metaphor for your loss of virginity, goddamit your alive music.

Amen.

  | ¶ 9:39 PM

  Fisking Geisler and McDowell...
I discussed yesterday in general terms my general distate for the fundamentalist Norman Geisler, who is praised by Joe Carter.

Let's get into a couple of specifics today. Hopefully some of the folks reading this will understand a scintilla of what they've been missing.

There's more...



I'm quoting from "Josh" McDowell's New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, in which itself quotes David K. Clark and Norman Geisler's Apologetics in the New Age: A Christian Critique of Pantheism.

If the Zen masters really were completely illlogical, there would be no difficulty in stating explicitly that language always distorts reality and then turning around to use language to describe reality. Of course, this would be a blatant inconsistency. Naturally it would horrify other philosophers. But if logic really does not matter and inconsistencies really are acceptable, then expressing such contradictions should pose no problem. The masters believe mutism [or a non-sensical answer, or a slap in the face] shows their conviction that rationality has been avoided. But resorting to mutism only shows that logic really does operate in the minds, if not the words of Zen masters.

Let's go through this and take it apart:

If the Zen masters really were completely illlogical, there would be no difficulty in stating explicitly that language always distorts reality and then turning around to use language to describe reality. Of course, this would be a blatant inconsistency.

We can show that we can use mathematics to show that all mathematical systems include either undecidable propositions or inconsistencies. There is, in fact, no blatant inconsistency in principle.

Language - like other systems- can be used for many things, including describing itself and its limitations, and chief among them is that it suffers from the fact that it uses a finite set of symbols, and that among different languages there is always a lack of an isomorphism between them. This is pretty elementary stuff, and Clark and Geisler can't seem to bring themselves to this simple point that even among mortal, fallible human beings, communication is not always possible.

Logic and the ability to work within it depends on the choice of axioms; if these cannot be agreed upon, a priori, all subsequent logical endeavors will be suspect.

...Naturally it would horrify other philosophers. But if logic really does not matter and inconsistencies really are acceptable, then expressing such contradictions should pose no problem.

Well, first off, philosophers have made a great deal of work out of using Buddhism to inform Western philosphy in the last few decades. I heard of no horrified philosophers. Further, "logic really does not matter" is a non sequitur: while all things cannot obviously be expressed using logic, it does not follow necessarily that "logic really does not matter."

To put it another way, if I'm playing tennis, I won't be using a frying pan, but if I'm making pan-fried steak, I won't need a tennis racket at that moment.

These are elementary fallacies, and Geisler's quotes in McDowell are riddled with them.

The masters believe mutism [or a non-sensical answer, or a slap in the face] shows their conviction that rationality has been avoided. But resorting to mutism only shows that logic really does operate in the minds, if not the words of Zen masters.

Suzuki tried explaining this somewhat poorly from his time and place, and I suspect that there's a bit easier way to describe the seemingly irrational behavior recorded in Zen texts: much of what is described is in fact a demonstration of the existence of the possibility and realization of a context change. What we think is not what is there, it is what we think. To substitute one for the other is, in fact, to be quite deluded.

Of course, the identification of Buddhism - and Zen in particular- with pantheism, which is what McDowell trots out from Geisler as well, is utterly false. Even before there were adequate Western ways of expressing Zen Buddhism to Western philosophers (and there are quite a few approximations to that today, thanks to folks such as William Barrett), this was clearly refuted. For example, see Suzuki's translation of Soyen-roshi's take on the God concept in Buddhism. Now this was written at a particular time and a particular place to a particular audience; today no Zen master, Asian or American or European uses language like this, but it is instructive nonetheless. A section that is particularly relevant and shows the meat of what Buddhists understand is the following:

Buddhism recognizes the coexistence and identity of the two principles, sameness and difference. Things are many and yet one; they are one and yet many. I am not thou, and thou art not I; and yet we are all one in essence. When one slays another, there is an actor, an act, and a sufferer, all distinct and separate; and yet

"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again."

[paragraph continues] Buddhism, therefore, says that while we have to acknowledge the world of particulars in which individuality predominates, we must not forget that looking through the gate of sameness all



distinctions and contradictions vanish in a higher principle of unity. A Japanese poet thus sings:

"Rain and hail and ice and snow,
Neither like the other. So!
When they melt, however, lo,
See one stream of water flow!

Intellectually, the coexistence of the two mutually excluding thoughts is impossible, for the proposition, "Mine are not thine," cannot be made at the same time the proposition, "Mine are thine." But here Buddhism is speaking of our inmost religious experience, which deals directly with facts and not with their more or less distorted intellectual reflections. It is, therefore, really idle to say that Buddhism is pantheistic or atheistic or nihilistic. Buddhism is not a philosophical system, though it is the most rational and intellectual religion in the world. What it proposes is to make clear facts of the deepest spiritual life and to formulate a doctrine which leads its followers to the path of inward experience.

Or as Thomas Merton put it, Zen is to theology as tennis is to mathematics.

I often ask myself why someone like Geisler, who is reputed to be such an intellect, misrepresents other-than-fundamentalist systems. But then I realize it's not important, what is important is my own sincerity and authenticity. But that's not always going to be comfortable to others.


  | ¶ 7:47 AM

  More war on terror BS
While the folks on the lunatic fringe talk about bringing "morals" back in government, it turns out the government was not telling us the truth about the recent al Qaeda "number 3" arrrested.

There's more...

THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.

Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.

Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.

“Al-Libbi is just a ‘middle-level’ leader,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a French intelligence investigator and leading expert on terrorism finance. “Pakistan and US authorities have completely overestimated his role and importance. He was never more than a regional facilitator between Al-Qaeda and local Pakistani Islamic groups.”

According to Brisard, the arrested man lacks the global reach of Al-Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, or Anas al-Liby.

Although British intelligence has evidence of telephone calls between al-Libbi and operatives in the UK, he is not believed to be Al-Qaeda’s commander of operations in Europe, as reported.

The only operations in which he is known to have been involved are two attempts to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, in 2003. Last year he was named Pakistan’s most wanted man with a $350,000 (£185,000) price on his head.

No European or American intelligence expert contacted last week had heard of al-Libbi until a Pakistani intelligence report last year claimed he had taken over as head of operations after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s arrest. A former close associate of Bin Laden now living in London laughed: “What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying.”

Of course this is not surprising; we're talking about people who wouldn't know what honest work is if they saw people actually working.



  | ¶ 2:41 AM

  Geisler, Aquinas, Dogen, and I
I have nothing profound to blog this weekend, but this post from Carter gave me a smidgen of fodder, a paen to Norman Geisler.

First of all, I'm a bit suspicious of any religious figure who owns his own domain name. Does Benedict XVI own his own domain? Nope, as Richard Bennet points out, somebody beat him to it. The Dalai Lama? Surely you jest. On the other hand, Jerry Falwell does, and http://www.joshmcdowell.com redirects you here, a McDowell site.

These guys with their own domain names, I think, already have their rewards, as somebody once said.

Of course, one could say that I have my own domain name, sort of. But that shows you exactly where I'm coming from. ;-) Sometimes you gotta put up a big neon sign, I think.

When Geisler's name comes up on the net, the first thing I'm drawn to is this bit on the Internet Infidels:

On January 27, 1987, I was led as a lamb to the slaughter, having been set up to debate the Rev. Dr. Norman Geisler of Dallas Theological Seminary on the subject, "Humanism vs. Christianity." Dubbed by its promoters as "The Main Event," the debate was held in the ballroom at Auburn University, a room overflowing with perhaps 2,000 people, some of whom had been bused in, courtesy of local churches.

Geisler had trouble staying on the general topic, focusing rather on abortion, in the most grisly terms. Humanists, he tells, are right in there with the Nazis in disregard of human life. Their despicable deeds are made likely, if not inevitable, by their moral relativism. How much firmer is the ground under Christians, who stand on moral absolutes!

During rebuttal, I said that my favorite moral absolute in scripture was in Luke 6:30 where Jesus is reported to have said, "Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again." I then turned to the Rev. Dr. Geisler and asked him for his money. Since it was not forthcoming, I knelt on one knee and begged for it, trying to cover all spiritual bases.

With a pale look about his gills, he finally pulled out a dollar bill and waved it wanly at me to which I said, "No, not a dollar; I want all of your money. But I'm not mean; I won't keep your wallet or credit cards." Geisler did not, in fact, comply with the moral absolute in Luke 6:30 (also see Matthew 5:42 and Luke 6:35). If he had given me his money, I would have taken it and kept it. Thus, we would both have been blessed, I with extra cash and he with a clear conscience for having met the challenge of obeying a moral absolute of his lord. I fear his conscience still troubles him over this episode, something I would gladly have spared him by keeping his money.

Bibliolaters are so fond of moral absolutes that I believe the rest of us should oblige them by giving them every opportunity to act thereupon. When you next hear a Christian extolling the rock of moral absolutes upon which he or she stands, go for the cash. It has a sobering effect that may in the long run be beneficial.

I keep hoping Geisler will come back to Auburn.

But let me go a bit deeper than that, so I can write about the purported title of this post.
Read more...






I've heard a lot of Geisler on the radio, and of course on the 'net. I've read McDowell's book on "evidence demanding a veridict" or what-not which quotes Geisler as an argument from authority extensively, and McDowell's book is the sloppiest, most intellectually dishonest book I have ever read on any religious topic, with the possible exception of various passages of scripture (I'll leave you to infer which. I'm not an expert on Hinduism.) Geisler is a key ingredient in McDowell's tome, which helps achieve the summum bonum of le bad theology in much the same way as Bela Lugosi helped Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" make it the standard for le bad cinema.

Geisler is a useful read because - and soley because- he helps hone one's skills on critical thinking, in much the same way as Thomas Aquinas, to whom Geisler is credited with mushing into evangelicaldom. From one of Carter's commenters:

I have studied with Dr. Geisler and it is correct to say that he writes many popular level works yet is an erudite thinker...especially in Thomistic philosophy.

Ah, so. So Geisler's brainy 'cause he explains Aquinas to these guys?
Uh, I never understood why Aquinas was so revered, either, frankly. Bertrand Russell wrote about him in A History of Western Philosophy:

In all Catholic educational institutions that teach philosophy his system has to be taught as the only right one; this has been the rule since a rescript of 1879 by Leo XIII...

In most respects, he follows Aristotle so closely that the Stagyrite has, among Catholics, almost the authority of one of the Fathers; to criticize him in matters of pure philosophy has come to be thought almost impious. This was not always the case.

I am also, I'd note, inherently suspicious of any philosopher who's taught as the "only philosophically correct" philosopher. As I note below, when one tries to use techniques that aren't involved in debating one on their points, (and putting Aquinas as "the theologically correct philospher" is one of them) clearly that is an indication of weakness.

So is, I might add, voting Democrats out of a church, which has jumped into the MSM today.

Anyway, back to Aquinas: you can read him on-line here. But Russell demolished Aquinas, as have many others over the years.

I always find it interesting that Aquinas was a contemporary (born 1225 or 1227; died 1274) of Dogen (born 1200, died 1253), with a gap of about 27 years, and both lived around 50 years or so.

So the greatest philosopher of Catholicism, and of many evangelicals was a contemporary of one of the greatest philosphers of Japan and Zen Buddhism.

Dogen's thinking, though while sometimes focused on the practical and instructional, very often is highly non-linear and abundnant in metaphors, especially when compared to Aquinas. In fact, you could say that all of Dogen is metaphorical, but he'd hit you and say, no every last bit of it is logical and literally true. From the last link:

Now in Great Song China there are careless fellows who form groups; they cannot be set straight by the few true masters. They say that the statement, "The eastern mountains travel on water," or Nanquan's story of a sickle,* is illogical; what they mean is that any words having to do with logical thought are not Buddha ancestors' Zen stories, and that only illogical stories are Buddha ancestors' expressions. In this way they consider Huangbo's staff and Linji's shout as being beyond logic and unconcerned with thought; they regard these as great enlightenments that precede the arising of form. "Ancient masters used expedient phrases, which are beyond understanding, to slash entangled vines."*: People who say this have never seen a true master and they have no eye of understanding. They are immature, foolish fellows not even worth discussing. In China these last two or three hundred years, there have been many groups of bald-headed rascals. What a pity! The great road of Buddha ancestors is crumbling. People who hold this view are not even as good as listeners of the Small Vehicles* and are more foolish than those outside the way. They are neither lay people nor monks, neither human nor heavenly beings. They are more stupid than animals who learn the Buddha way. The illogical stories mentioned by you bald-headed fellows are only illogical for you, not for Buddha ancestors. Even though you do not understand, you should not neglect studying the Buddha ancestors' path of understanding. Even if it is beyond understanding in the end, your present understanding is off the mark. I have personally seen and heard many people like this in Song China. How sad that they do not know about the phrases of logical thought, or penetrating logical thought in the phrases and stories! When I laughed at the them in China, thy had no response and remained silent. Their idea about illogical words is only a distorted view. Even if there is no teacher to show you the original truth, your belief in spontaneous enlightenment is heretical.

This is from a man, understand, whose own spontaneous enlightenment story- "spontaneous" of course after years of practice- is well known. At each word, Dogen challenges us to examine our preconceived notions about everything. Aquinas tells you like he sees it, and pronounces himself as saying only this way.

So, in my estimation, Dogen is the greater philospher, since Dogen is more concerned about the real inquiry than Aquinas, who just wants to tell you his answer.

Aquinas's brand of philosphy is not worth an hour's trouble, as Pascal would have said, but Dogen's brand of philosophy is something to help you live and to be an active participant in your life.

On the other hand, I'm Rinzai and not Soto but those are differences without much distinction.







  | ¶ 8:27 AM

  What some folks do when they can't win an argument and cannot admit defeat, either.
Link

An American Jesuit who is a frequent television commentator on Roman Catholic issues resigned yesterday under orders from the Vatican as editor of the Catholic magazine America because he had published articles critical of church positions, several Catholic officials in the United States said.

The order to dismiss the editor, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, was issued by the Vatican's office of doctrinal enforcement - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - in mid-March when that office was still headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said. Soon after, Pope John Paul II died and Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, taking the name Benedict XVI...

America magazine, a weekly based in New York City, is a moderate-to-liberal journal published by the Jesuits, a religious order known for producing the scholars who run many of the church's universities and schools. The Jesuits prize their independence, but like everyone in the church, even their top official, the Jesuit superior general in Rome, ultimately answers to the pope.

In recent years America has featured articles representing more than one side on sensitive issues like same-sex marriage, relations with Islam and whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be given communion. Church officials said it was the publication of some of these articles that prompted Vatican scrutiny.

And that's why we have freedom of speech in this country- and almost entirely unlimited, too.

Because dogma bites.

I should also add that I was told by a Jesuit once that there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with JPII, that he had way overstepped his bound.

I think Ratzinger's going to attempt to do to Benedict XV what John Paull II did for John XXIII & Paul VI.

This seems to be a popular gambit in the religion/politics world today. Seems a bunch of folks are hell-bent on telling others what to do, what to say, how to exercise their liberties, and they'll use coercion if they don't like how you behave, though it be legal.

They're cheap extortionists, nothing more, nothing less.




  | ¶ 8:14 AM

  Interesting sites on Shaolin temple and gung fu
Here and here.

It is amazing what you can run into in the Pacific Northwest.


  | ¶ 6:47 AM

  This is starting to get monotonous...

This:



takes on a whole new meaning when you read this.

(HT Big Brass Blog.)  | ¶ 5:09 PM

  The stupidity of "non-compete" agreements
link

James Pilger, the owner of a luxury hair salon in Plainview, N.Y., never saw it coming. In the space of three months, the cream of his staff jumped to a new salon started by a trusted employee of 17 years.

That workplace mutiny in early 2003 left Mr. Pilger feeling betrayed and, much worse, destroyed the business he had spent years building into a full-fledged body-care retreat, complete with hair salon, full-service spa, yoga classes and party space. "Twenty five of my key people took 44 of my top 50 paying clients," he said. "I went from $50,000 a week to $25,000 a week."

The rival salon opened a few miles away and lured his employees with higher commissions and, in at least one case, an ownership stake, Mr. Pilger says. He says he believes that his client information was used by the competitor for a mass mailing to solicit his customers. Bleeding losses, Mr. Pilger closed his establishment, named Solo, in August 2003 and took a job at another nearby salon.

Maybe he should have followed the example of many large corporations and asked his employees to sign written commitments to refrain from competing against him or otherwise undermining his franchise...

Human Resource Management and the president of the consulting group McGuireWoods HR Strategies[:] "If a potential employee is not willing to sign a contract, then maybe they're not the right employee for you,...Frankly, recruitment may become more difficult, but at least you won't spend every day worrying about whether half your staff might walk out the door."

Frankly,

1. If the managers had better business models, the employees wouldn't leave. Nobody can say that any other business is identical to a previous business.

2. If the managers had a better employment proposition for their employees, they wouldn't be tempted to leave.

I think - and it has been generally true in the past- most of these "agreements" are utterly unenforceable. But with the Bush folks, watch out: they would love nothing better to bring employment back to the indentured servitude of the "yellow dog contract" days.


  | ¶ 2:59 AM

  Who are you?
Something that needs to be rescured from the memory hole.

Who Are You?

My name is Peter.
If you went to Nicaragua, you'd be called Pedro. Are Pedro and Peter one person or two?
One, because I am only who I am.
Are you a name?
No, of course not.
Then who are you?
I am a man.
You mean you are not a woman?
No. I mean that I am a man.
But you are only a man because you are not a woman.

Who are you?
I am an Englishman.
If you went to Japan, would you be a Japanese man?
No.
Why?
Because I was born in England and I speak English.
If you had been born in England but raised in China, would you be Chinese or English?
I would be English.
Oh, then, you are not a person, rather you are a country.

Who are you?
I am the grandson of a famous Arctic explorer. He returned from the North Pole with a frozen polar bear in the hull of his ship.
And which do you think you are defined more by, your grandfather or the polar bear?
How could I be defined by my family? I'm just me.
Then you are more like a polar bear?

No. I am an intelligent, accomplished man. That's what everyone says.
Now, let me see: you are Peter who is intelligent and accomplished and special because your grandfather was a famous Arctic explorer. What else sets you apart?
My youngest daughter is a world-class gymnast and my mother died when I was a child.
Ah, you are Peter the tragic, Peter the successful. Which would you say is the real you: a motherless son or the father of a successful daughter?
Both are within me.
Where?
What do you mean?
When you say they are within you, are they closer to your head or your toes?
Closer to my heart.
It's a feeling?
Yes.
How big is it?
I'm not sure.
What color is it?
It doesn't have a color.
A form?
No.
But it's inside you?
Yes.
If we cut open your heart, could we see it?
I don't suppose so.
Then where is it?
I don't know.
Are you sure it is inside you?
Where else could it be?

Come here. Look in the mirror. Do you see intelligence? grandfather? accomplishment? gymnast?
No.
Do you see English?
No.
Do you see Peter?
I don't know.
Good. Now we can begin.

Who are you?

  | ¶ 2:37 AM

  Focus on the Family: the breadth of the lies are amazing
Read FOTF's coverage of a recent Americans United for Separation of Church and State complaint to the Air Force Acadamy, and then read the AU complaint for yourself.

That FOTF wants to favor religious bigotry is clearly undeniable.


  | ¶ 2:01 PM

  Robert Bork really was a dangerous nutcase.
Ed Brayton catalogs the bizarreness of Bork.

Nobody can call this guy an "originalist," or a guy who says the constitution should be interpreted "exactly as it says."

Brayton's best example:

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

  | ¶ 8:51 AM

  Chuck Colson plays the victim card again
Colson has an article in Beliefnet that simply is astounding in its comparisons between Christianity, Buddhism, Eastern sensibilities, etc. Its underlying resentment is quite amazing too. But most of all, I'm amazed at Colson's ignorance of Eastern culture, Disney's business situation, and how business is done in this part of the world.

I don't know how much of this is being done to placate the oriental mind—this is, after all, an Asian theme park. But I can't imagine the local visitors asking if the park had been designed according to feng shui or if incense was being properly burned.

As a matter of fact, according to the New York Times, I believe, their newspaper boxes in Chinatown were painted red (meaning good fortune) as opposed to the default blue (more associated with death).

This sort of thing is done as a matter of course in the East.

Businesses' offices are often opened with the assistence of Shinto priests in Japan (despite the fact that most people aren't really religious at all).

The building where I work (a certain Japanese company) is sited perfectly taking feng shui into account.

People know this stuff.

My neighborhood has a large number of Chinese folks because, well, the feng shui of the development is generally very good. That's why we bought our house, though of course I knew Jack about feng shui. But my wife did.

All of this, of course, is going on at a time when Christians are being blasted for being oppressive, bringing religion into public life, and making demands on the Congress. And the press is not very charitable to us. Columnist Gary Wills after the last election wondered what kind of a country this is where a majority of the people believes in such "myths" as the virgin birth.

But at the same time we find hard-headed, profit-conscious businessmen—-the executives at Disney—-spending hard-earned money for a feng shui expert to come in and tell them the way in which they ought to arrange the buildings to bring about good luck. This does not seem to bother Gary Wills or our cultural elite.

All of this would be comical if it were not so utterly absurd. Disney is catering to superstitions and the local, sensitive Buddhist culture.

Disney is making a business decision. And you know what? Despite their shouting, the fundamentalist Christians in the US aren't exactly the core of Disney's business.


Read more...

By contrast, look at what happens in the United States. At the Epcot Center in Orlando, there is a dazzling display of how life came about, popping up from a single cell in the oceans—pure chance-plus-time evolution. Why does it go to Hong Kong and respect local religions and then hit Christians in the face back home?

Maybe because a) believe it or not, Disney in the US attracts a big foreign crowd, and they're not fundamentalist creationists, and b) as I said before, fundamentalist creationists ar not - and haven't been- essential to Disney's success in the US.

And Colson, please stop equating all Christians with creationists. That's a lie, and I'm sure you know it.

Well, this kind of tolerance is causing Disney to embrace superstitions overseas, but when it comes to the majority religion here in America, we are oppressors—we are not entitled to anythin

For better or worse, for whatever reason feng shui sells. And people who know about it - and they do- are more likely to cater to real estate designed with these principles in mind. Whole developments are designed this way now.

Actually there are good design reasons why some aspects of feng shui should be used: the right orientation of furniture prevents people from being startled when someone enters a room. Similar reasoning would apply for orientations of interiors. Buildings facing north or south get more even light during the day than buildings facing east or west. Sure, it's all layered with a patina of Eastern philosphy, but there's a practical sensibilty behind it all.

Despite actually investigating as to why Disney's doing this, Colson sees yet another vaporous opportunity to cry "bigotry!"






  | ¶ 4:34 AM

  危機修行: Update
Yesterday was one of the stranger days of my life. Apparently there have been some acts of vandalism directed against some Chinese families in our neighborhood; my wife had warned me that stones were thrown at our house one day recently. Because of the impending slow-mo Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves in my office, and because of an impending meeting,



I was up rather early yesterday morning (though I'm often up that early to go to the gym), but without much sleep.

Anyway I saw what I convinced was the culprits' car, and the culprits therein, which made for a rather weird confrontation. When faced with having to defend my family, I have found that I can revert to some rather strange behavior. Seeing the apparent culprits, though completely unarmed, I stared at the idling vehicle and its occupants to try to remember all I could in case I had to describe it to the police. In so doing, I noticed one of the occupants of the car, with a closely shaved head, was staring at me. In response, I adopted the same expression and demeanor I had once appreciated on the face of a bodyguard sent by the mob to guard an exotic dancer at a friend's batchelor party many many years ago: an expression of almost joyful murderousness, a "go ahead, fuck with me" kind of face, all the while being hyper-mindful and keeping MU very close. Not that I could do anything but run if confronted, but I hadn't had much sleep and I didn't have my cell phone with me.

Apparently that is enough to scare off low-life wannabe skinheads in this part of town. Racist wankers. I had an uncle that worked for Bugsy Segal; I never knew this growing up, and only found out about it after he died. Which was too bad- if that meme had been gently propagated in my neighborhood when I was a kid perhaps the neighborhood bully wouldn't have tried something with my little brother, prompting an almost Shakespearian tale of revenge (note to self: must remove Tarantinoisms from my writing). But what the heck- it's apparently in my genes somewhere.


And that was just the beginning of my day.
Read more...


Yesterday I was able to infer that the folks who the cmpany I work for practice politics at a mulitdimensional byzantine level that some low level managers like the one to whom I report don't seem to begin to grasp, in my view. Which is probably too bad for them, because I understand what they're doing and why. I have to set up a meeting with the president of my outfit and say to him, "You sly dog, you!"

Finally, the day turned a 180 with a visit to my son's school. My son sat stood for 20 minutes showing us how he painted a picture. He definitely DOES NOT have attention deficit disorder. He put stuff away. He demonstrated some really cool abstract, purposeful thinking, and is learning to read and count. I did not give a microgram of feces over my current 会社の危機.

To top it all off, we went out for my wife's birthday to a local restaurant, Beaches.

What we didn't know is that the wait staff actually took my kid around, affording me about 20 mintues to actually talk with my dear wife.

Geez, how destiny changes with practice.







  | ¶ 4:19 AM

  I don't know how I knew this
but knew the South Park Episode where Kenny has to die to save heaven was based not only on the real life issues of Terri Schiavo having to die to save heaven, but also the existence of Christian video games.

A Christian video game. While video games might be fun for a while, I'm not sure it's going to be a good way to cultivate goodness, whatever the religious themed game.

OTOH, I suspect that first person shooter games can train someone to be a, er...first person shooter.  | ¶ 10:16 PM

  Gen Y and religion
From Donkey Rising, we learn that at some point, the Republicans will either ditch the right-wing religious extremists or be shut out of government.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are witnessing the high water mark of the supremacy of the religious right.

Remember that the next time somebody tries to claim to speak for all "people of faith."

...Generation Y, which may be loosely defined as those born between 1980 and 2000 (though the report really only covers only the adult members of this generation, those currently 18-25 years of age).The report, with the somewhat gimmicky title of "OMG: How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era", was written by Anna Greenberg and is based on a large-scale survey with oversamples among Jews, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Muslims, as well as supplementary analyses of Census and other data, all conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Much of the report focuses on the detailed religious and civic attitudes of Gen Y adults and I won't go into those findings here--read the instructive report to get the full picture. But there are some broader findings in the report that are worth highlighting.

Generation Y is extraordinarily diverse in a race-ethnic sense. Only 61 percent of Geb Y adults are white; 15 percent are black, 4 percent are Asian and 17 percent are Hispanic.

Generation Y is more secular and less Christian. Almost a quarter (23 percent) have no religious preference or are agnostic/atheist, 4 percent are Jewish or Muslim and another 7 percent are other non-Christian; only 62 percent identify themselves with some Christian faith.

Gen Y is at the leading edge of what Chris Bowers has pointed out is an extremely fast-growing demographic: the non-Christian coalition. Between 1990 and 2001, according to CUNY's American Religious Identification Survey, non-Christians grew by 84 percent (from 20 to 37 million adults), including an astonishing increase of 106 percent (from 14 to 29 million) among seculars.

This appears to be a ticking time bomb for conservatives. Oh, yeah, I know, they're going to say, "I was more liberal when I was younger too." Somehow I doubt that this is true across generations, and, even if true for the boomers, I suspect Gen Y will go against the Boomers on these issues- it simply makes no sense to repeat their dumb mistakes.

On the other hand,

It is interesting to see my son's identities emerging: he is an American, he is Chinese, he knows about Jesus, but only in the same sense as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny - and I might add, the Quan Yin, or Maritreya or Jizo

Except that Quan Yin or Maritreya are usually brought up and the focus is brought back to my child - defining himself by mindfulness.

That whole document is interesting reading- we learn that Evangelical Gen Y'ers don't tend to worry about getting a sexually transmitted disease. But given the situation with abstinence only education (when people stop being abstinent they are also less likely to use means that would prevent STDs) , it seems rather likely...I would wager...that these kids are more likely to be vectors of STDs. But then again, at least some of them are less likely to get into trouble. I guess it's like the boy who wne he is good is very good, but when he was bad...

  | ¶ 9:51 PM

  Changing Destiny: A Commentary on Liaofan’s Four Lessons
Here is a very interesting work to those interested in Buddhism; I was recently given a paper copy of it in a local Vietnamese Pure Land/Zen Buddhist temple.

That text, states explictly that no money is to be charged for the selling of the book.

One phrase from that book leaps out:

Utmost sincerity can split a stone of diamond, can evoke a response from Heaven, and can change destiny." Consider the well-known account of what happened to the famous General Guang Lee who lived during the Han Dynasty. One time he and his soldiers were on a march. On one side of the road, the grass was very long. There was a large stone partially hidden in the grass and he mistakenly thought it was a tiger. He immediately shot an arrow and it went deep into its target.

After getting off his horse and going to survey his marksmanship, he was amazed to see that it was a stone! He thought, "I must be very strong to have shot an arrow so deep into a stone!" He tried again and again, but failed to repeat his accomplishment. From this, we can see that the first shot resulted from the utmost sincerity of having no wandering thoughts.

Similarly, when Great Master Kumarajiva was about seven years old, he lifted up a great iron bowl without so much as a thought. But then he thought, "I am so small. How could I have lifted it?" He tried to do so again, but failed. General Guang Lee had mistaken the stone for a tiger and was able to shoot an arrow into it. Master Kumarajiva thought nothing of the weight of a great iron bowl and was able to lift it. Once General Guang Lee realized that the tiger was actually a stone and Master Kumarajiva realized that the iron bowl was extraordinarily heavy, they were unable to repeat their previous accomplishments. Both initially acted from the mind of sincerity that had no wandering thoughts. Thus, the stone was split open and the iron bowl was lifted up.

From these two examples, we can confirm what is said in the Flower Adornment Sutra, "there are no hindrances among phenomena or principles." This is achieved when the mind attains a certain degree of purity as we sever our wandering discriminatory thoughts and attachments. If the mind is not pure, then all phenomena present obstacles. But, when the mind is pure, there are no obstacles.

This is another way of saying prajnaparamita- the perfection of wisdom.
This purity of mind, combined with an active practice being aware of one's errors and faults and of actively, mindfully practicing meritorious deeds, is recommended to "change one's destiny."


Liaofan, the subject of the book wrote:

I wrote down my wish to pass the imperial examinations and vowed to complete three thousand meritorious deeds to show my gratitude towards my ancestors, Earth, and Heaven


I think that people who are Western Buddhists too frequently have a bit of post-Christian residue. The idea expounded in this Pure Land/Zen text - of recording instances of deliberately sought after and engaged in meritorious deeds- seems a bit obessive at first, but in reality, is quite a sure fire way to do good and cultivate loving-kindness.  | ¶ 9:31 PM

  Energy and time


'Self-centred and naive, the Yankees' attitude to their cars speaks volumes'

...[T]he car is far more than a means of transport (though in this far-flung country it is often the only means of getting to the nearest bus stop or subway, let alone the nearest grocer's).

t doesn't matter that the top two best-selling luxury cars are foreign (Lexus and BMW), as are the top two best-selling midsize sedans (Toyota Camry and Honda Accord). For Americans, the car retains the glorious aura inspired by Jack Kerouac's nostalgic prose and Henry Ford's unparalleled industry. It is your bulletin board on which to post stickers supporting your political party ('A democrat's an ass' accompanies a picture of the Democrats' symbol, the donkey); religion (countless fish, the symbol preferred by Evangelical Christians); your child's academic record ('Walt Whitman High School Honor Roll').

It is your entertainment space - many new models, like the popular Toyota Scion T2B, sport rear windows that double as video screen. It serves as your kitchen (there are cup-n-sandwich trays that attach to the dashboard, for meals on the run). And it confirms your status: pick-ups are for the rednecks in the outback, hummers for wealthy and trendy young families, SUVs for soccer moms. The car also plays a crucial role in the rites of passage celebrated in American mythology: it's where high school kids first make out, it's what proud middle-class dads give their offspring on getting into college, it's what husbands give their trophy wives to parade in.

Add to this the fact that the average American spends two-and-a-half hours at the wheel and you can see why - although I have been here in Washington DC for only a few days - groans about gasoline greet me at every gathering.

Between the television and the automobile, it is a wonder that Americans have any time to do anything else.

The petroleum culture of America has had profound implications on the way we live, not all fo them good. We are owned by these devices as much as they own us.  | ¶ 8:41 AM

  An Allegory for the United States


The "Godzilla" movies we knew growing up were amusing for their bad special effects, caricatures of Japanese behavior, bad scripts, and bad acting all around.

Somewhere in my life, re-seeing the movies (I guess in the 80's) I figured out what they were really about: in a nation that had been devestated by war, for the first time in its history occupied by a foreign power, the safest way for Japan to express its horror at the destruction and impotence visited upon it (as a result of its imperialism, of course) was to use an allegory. The New York Times has finally figured out this with a penetrating glance into what I'd say is the obvious:

A fire-breathing reptile is pretty much the same in any language. But the butchered version of the film that swept the world after release in the United States was stripped of the political subtext - and the anti-American, antinuclear messages - that had saturated the original. The uncut version of the film is due out on home video early next year, and should push serious Godzilla fans to rethink the 50-year evolution of the series. It should also show them that they were hoodwinked by the denatured Americanized version that dominated many of their childhoods in the late 20th century. At the same time, Godzilla fans are on the edge of their seats about a new film that should be released in the United States soon.

The original "Gojira" was never intended as a conventional monster-on-the-loose movie. Nor did it resemble the farcical rubber-suit wrestling matches or the domesticated movies (with Godzilla cast as a mammoth household pet) that the series degenerated into during the 1960's and 70's.

As the historian William Tsutsui reminded us in last year's cult classic, "Godzilla on My Mind," the 1954 movie was a dark, poetic production that dealt openly with Japanese misgivings about the nuclear menace, environmental degradation and the traumatic experience associated with World War II.

No sh*t, Sherlock.

What is even more interesting about the uncut version of the movie coming out is that it coincides with the re-emergence of Japan as a military power in its own right; one wonders what kind of monster would be depicted to represent China, and who would fight whom where.




  | ¶ 8:23 AM