Not much to report on today... Mexico...

The NY Times doesn't like leftists in Mexico.

SHOULD Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the front-runner in Mexico's presidential race, emerge victorious on Sunday, it could usher in a form of Latin American leftism as yet unseen: messianic populism. Mexico's fragile democracy could become its first casualty.

Outside of Mexico, people ask which Latin American leader Mr. López Obrador most resembles: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The truth is that he's not like any of them. He does not have the military stamp of Comandante Chávez or the indigenist roots of Mr. Morales. Nor is he a born compromiser like Mr. Lula who, as some Brazilians say, seems to "know the value of 10 percent." Mr. López Obrador is different: he always strives for 100 percent. And he has higher models to emulate.

Earlier this year an interviewer asked him what religion he followed. "I'm Catholic, fundamentally Christian," Mr. López Obrador responded. "The life and work of Jesus fill me with passion. He, too, was persecuted in his time, spied on by the powerful of his era, and he was crucified."...

His platform is full of unrealizable initiatives: a microcredit program (a very promising project) but for a whopping eight million people (consider that the successful Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has taken on fewer than six million borrowers since 1976); bullet trains from Mexico City to the northern border (which would not only be expensive, but also face competition from low-cost airlines).

Yeah, microcredit won't work for 8 million people!

That dern liberal media again...

Here's what Tom Hayden says:

Apocalyptic scenarios are never to be ruled out in Mexico. If Lopez Obrador wins by a close margin and sectors of the elite and armed forces refuse to accept defeat, much of Mexico might become like Oaxaca and San Salvador Atenco, with people pouring into the streets in a prolonged confrontation.

An even darker projection, commonly if privately expressed by many Mexicans, is that Lopez Obrador will be assassinated if he comes close to the ring of power. Luis Donaldo Colosio, a presidential candidate in 1994, was assassinated in broad daylight. That election ushered in the NAFTA era and the simultaneous Zapatista uprising.

If the supporters of Lopez Obrador sense that the election is stolen from them, they will not go quietly like Al Gore’s Democratic Party in 2000. It is accepted across Mexico that the 1988 presidential election was crudely stolen from the then-PRD candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of Lazaro Cardenas. At that time, the lack of popular organization and fears of a massacre led the PRD candidate to accept the fraudulent outcome. “Not this time,” I was told. “The people won’t let this election be stolen.” The street demand to defend the vote could bridge the differences, at least temporarily, with the Zapatistas.

Indeed, a fusion of popular mobilization and electoral politics has saved Lopez Obrador before. In 1998, his campaigners blocked roads and oil fields after he lost a gubernatorial race in Tabasco described as “fraud-ridden” by the New York Times (March 16, 2005). Only last year, the major parties tried to force him off the ballot by indicting him on a spurious corruption charge involving the construction of a road to a private hospital. Presidential candidates are disqualified if they are indicted. So Lopez Obrador’s destiny was in doubt until hundreds of thousands of people rallied in the streets. Lopez Obrador announced he would go to jail rather than submit, leaving his enemies to ponder the prospect of 1 million Mexicans marching on his prison site. The charges went away.

This fusion of direct action and constitutional politics makes this a unique campaign in a country long ruled from the top down by chicanery and fraud. It appears that mass mobilization is necessary to make electoral politics work at all, and to defend the vote even when politics succeed.

Close supporters of Lopez Obrador dismiss these extreme scenarios, not wanting to increase tensions any further. They insist that their candidate will win decisively by peaceful means. They also are quick to reject any allegations that they are closet chavistas or fidelistas. Having an electoral strategy by itself separates them from the Zapatistas. While naturally part of the progressive trend now sweeping Latin America, they insist on a unique Mexican identity in the tradition of Morelos, Juarez, Zapata, Madero and, perhaps most of all, Cardenas. That tradition alone always has constituted a challenge to the United States.

Water is the next oil...

Unfortunately, other than GE, (yeah, GE) I haven't found anything worth looking at for investment purposes. And GE is vulnerable right now; it's P/E is too high.

Meanwhile, look at this...

"Vast and reasonably priced" for "you get what you pay for, otherwise free" spectrum?

The NY Times provides no insight into what unlicensed networks are, do, and cost:

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office, and when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in this city that offer free wireless access.

He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him $12.50 a month...

Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

$12.50/month ain't cheap, and it certainly ain't cheap in Taiwan.

And I can't imagine that phone service, or downloads of music is going to make much of a difference.

What Stirling Newberry said

in this post on TPM cafe reflects sentiments I share:

In short, I'm in favor of recessions hitting those hardest who are the most responsible for them, and that isn't the average working person, the average poor person, or even the average upper middle class person. It's the executive class.

Yep.

Mount St. Helens

If you haven't been there in 5 years, you really ought to go see it again. It really, really really is becoming a different mountain.

Ye gods, just how ignorant is the intended NY Times reader?

Here's a typical bit from today; I've thought of about 3 or 4 of them from various parts of the on-line issue before in frustration I got to this one:

INEQUALITY has always been part of the American economy, but the gap between the rich and the poor has recently been widening at an alarming rate. Today, more than 40 percent of total income is going to the wealthiest 10 percent, their biggest share of the nation's pie in at least 65 years. The social and political repercussions of this disparity have been widely debated, but what about the effects on the economy?

Oddly, despite its position in the political debate, the question has received little attention from economists...

Perhaps because the effects of inequality have been understood for quite some time?

Sir Michael Marmot, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and director of its International Institute for Society and Health, has spent most of his career studying the link between inequality and health around the world. In a much-publicized paper published in May in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Sir Michael and three colleagues studied health in the United States and in Britain. They found that at various points throughout the social hierarchy, there was more illness in the United States than in Britain.

Sir Michael theorizes that a reason for the disparity was the greater inequalities in the United States and heavier stresses resulting from them.

Yeah, yeah we knew that.

What about the scientists and engineers?

Alon Levy at UTI has a post that refers to a post by one that refers to by one Kristine Harley that is worth a link and a quote:

We are being groomed by her and the other media sock puppets of rich creationist conservatives for a new American order, one in which the U.S. health care system is for shit! Okay? In lieu of basic health services we are going to be given prayer and preaching and personal guilt, and to accomplish this, these cretins need to rewrite the whole history of science--the most precious thing that we have--in order to push supernaturalism. They who control the past will control the future. Is that clear?

Already, a significant portion of Americans do not have health insurance, and the number of employers who don't offer this basic right are growing. One-fifth of all children live in poverty. Television is killing literacy in this country. And the same Americans who revile Bush for getting us into the Iraq War are the ones who will not step up to the plate and accept responsibility for pushing superstition into our nation's schools. These people have no right to whine about Bush while simultaneously siding with his minions who would teach little kids that the eye was intelligently designed and that people get sick because of "sin."

Whether or not George W. Bush stole the (or both) election(s), we are all responsible for not stealing legitimate science from the next generation of schoolchildren. If we lose the next generation of scientists, it will be our tragedy and our fault, not Bush's. That means that American students must learn evolutionary theory, not the latest supernaturalist garbage. That means that you, dear reader, cannot in any way support the teaching of Intelligent Design or Biblical or Koranic or whatever-have-you creationism in public schools. Facts are facts.

One thing I'd note though, as a scientist: These folks pushing this crap from the highest levels do not, cannot, really believe this crap. They need scientists and engineers to run the creative engines that give them an edge. They "know" the scientists and engineers produce theories and intellectual property and design for stuff that works.

To me, that is one of the big neon signs that indicate that the fealty the ideas of Leo Strauss (or, by way of imitative flattery, Lenin) holds sway amongst the folks in power. The "inside party," in contrast to what Orwell wrote knows they're peddling a crock of shit. From the Wikipedia entry on Strauss:

Strauss noted that thinkers of the first rank, going back to Plato, had raised the problem of whether good and effective politicians could be completely truthful and still achieve the necessary ends of their society. By implication, Strauss asks his readers to consider whether "noble lies" have any role at all to play in uniting and guiding the polis. Are "myths" needed to give people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society? Or can men and women dedicated to relentlessly examining, in Nietzsche's language, those "deadly truths", flourish freely? Thus, is there a limit to the political, and what can be known absolutely? In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately, and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth.

According to Strauss, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies had mistaken the city-in-speech described in Plato's Republic for a blueprint for regime reform--which it was not. Strauss quotes Cicero, "The Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things- the nature of the city." (History of Political Philosophy, p.68). Strauss himself argued in many publications that the city-in-speech was unnatural, percisely because "it is rendered possible by the abstraction from eros (Strauss' italics). (HPP, p.60). The city-in-speech abstracted from eros, or bodily needs, thus it could never guide politics in the manner Popper claimed.

Now from the above quotes, I question whether much time should be spent on Strauss. I have to find a class of linear operators...which would inevitably be more beautiful and rewarding than to review the musings of some deceased crackpot whose noodle-headed ideas indirectly were implicated as a supporting cause of the deaths of thousands. But one quote at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry bears noting:

…no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.

This quote should be singled out because of its interlocking falsities:

• There are indeed changes of society that can mitigate evil in humanity.
• There are indeed changes of society that can mitigate greed, hatred, and ignorance. Strauss doesn't mind not mitigating ignorance, I would suppose.
• These changes start from within one's self, and is quintessentially self-evident.
• Hence there can be societies in which coercive restraint is minimized. It inolves a disciplined citizenry contributing to the common good.

No society of insiders focused only on their own short-term benefits can remain top dog for any extended period, because some folks who are within the unwashed masses will always discover disciplined awareness transmuted into action will have benefits that help all, to the detriment of the insiders, and these folks within the unwashed masses must exist precisely because at least some of the unwashed masses must always posses a degree of awareness and skepticism because it is necessary to keep the apparatus of the society running.

The new physics and Kos

I can't imagine there's a reader of my blog who doesn't know aobut Kos, of course, but today's bit by Darksyde on the new physics includes this pretty addictive Power-Point like show.

Weird NY Times story on Repubs:

I had heard Greg Pallast last night on Mike Malloy as I couldn't get to sleeep...Pallast's words were a cliche to a guy who'd done nicely in oil: he said that the reason we invaded Iraq was to keep oil prices high, not to get oil.

I kinda thought that, and so did the stock market,....which (Leo Strauss anyone?) brings me to today's story from the NY Times:

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush's top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Republicans say the cumulative effect would be to send a message of weakness to the world at a time of new threats from Iran and North Korea and would leave enemies controlling Iraq's vast oil reserves, the third largest in the world. (The book, including a chapter entitled "Rapid Response" with answers to frequent Democratic charges, was sent via e-mail to Republican lawmakers but, in an apparent mistake, also to some Democrats.)

Well, let's go see "Rapid Response." But first:

...the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Huh? Must humliate defeat? Why must? Must not? And, er,uh..."Islamo-fascist?"

Thousands of troops died so that George Bush could do a devil's bargain with the Saudis so that they could sell non-cheap oil and in return they'd make a pretense of occasionally rounding up the usual suspects.

This is projection of blame: thousands died because it was George W. Bush's fault and you want thousands more to die because?????

About "Rapid Response." I haven't found it on line yet, but I'm looking. But it's evident that they've been ham-fisted about this whole thing, something the Times sort of airbrushed out.

This is so below the belt...

I'm ashamed to do this, and please accept my apologies in advance, and yes, I agree if it was wrong to bash Chelsea Clinton, it's wrong to bash descendants of George H.W. Bush, ....but still, what Wonkette reports is just the sort of thing that Bush relatives ought not to do.

Creationist chuckles...

PZ Meyers reminds me, via this chortler at "Uncommon Descent" (into what? stupidity? ) that as I was trying to get my mind to turn off yesterday, I had found that wonderful program with cheesey graphics, "The Creation Network."

And they were highlighting creationist Robert Gentry, who claimed there's polonium where there shouldn't be any in granite; polonium has a short 1/2 life, therefore, -POW!- instant creation. Only....as a geologist who knows better than I says, "there is no good evidence they are the result of polonium decay as opposed to any other radioactive isotope, or even that they are caused by radioactivity at all. "

Gentry, as it turns out, has a website. He seems a bit peeved that his dogma is not taken seriously by scientists.

Conservatism: still no ideas, "just irritable mental gestures."

They NY Times helpfully tells us today that the righties have published their own Das Kaptial...

"Feel the heft of it," said Lee Edwards, a former aide to Senator Barry Goldwater, who appears in the volume with a byline and an entry. "It's more than a book. It is, if you will, an estimate — it shows the maturation of the conservative movement."...

"We've gone from history's adversary to destiny's child, but governing has brought a whole new level of challenge," said Jeffrey O. Nelson, publisher of ISI Books, the conservative press in Wilmington, Del., that produced the encyclopedia. Criticizing what he called the "big education, big spending, big war, big government" conservatism of Republican leaders, Mr. Nelson said he hoped that the book, whose list price is $35, would help the movement return to its small-government roots...

Some entries wear their conservatism on their sleeve. Goldwater's "loyalties were to duty, honor and country." Ronald Reagan had a "vigorous and principled agenda." Bill Clinton was "corrupt."

Except for a few hare-brained schems about as sensible as the Stalin cow, I didn't find anything that resembed an "idea" in that story.

There is a mention of "public choice theory" but it looks like Wikipedia's entry implies that the rational stuff can be divorced from the conservative spin that "this shows government is bad." No: it only shows conservatives will rip us off if allowed to go near government, because they will set up conditionsunder which the public has no power.

And that reminds me: I have to take Leo Strauss apart someday. There's something broken there, a part has to be bought from Home Depot or something...

Dick Cheney and the Neyman-Pearson Lemma

This video over at Crooks and Liars reminds me of something that everyone who knows the least bit squat about information theory knows. Cheney, according to Ron Suskind, wanted to treat 1% probability events as "certainties" in responses.

Now the Neyman-Pearson, as outlined by Wikipedia says:

when performing a hypothesis test between two point hypotheses H₀: θ=θ₀ and H₁: θ=θ₁, then the likelihood-ratio test which rejects H₀ in favour of H₁ when

is the most powerful test of size α.

Now for those of you who need further explanation without clicking over to Wikipedia:

The power of a statistical test is the probability that the test will reject a false null hypothesis, or in other words that it will not make a Type II error. As power increases, the chances of a Type II error decrease, and vice versa. The probability of a Type II error is referred to as β. Therefore power is equal to 1 − β.

What this means is that Dick Cheney guaranteed the consequences of making a Type I error (falsely calling the null hypothesis the alternative) would increase.

Hence all the bullshit we've been seeing...

No wonder

Limbaugh hates progressive and centrist blogs, and the reason is quite simple they're huge.:

Kos doesn't get it....QoS is good; "best effort" is what you get

Kos has a bit of trouble distinguishing between a public internet and a private internet with more capabilities.

Why not have the public internet include those capabilities with an infrastructure build out?

Ab-so-lute-ly Totally True:

Prices for spices in ethnic food enclaves can be far lower than in supermarkets.

And not just spices.

• Peanut Oil
• Sesame Oil
• Fish
• Mushrooms (Never pay more than $5.00/lb for Shiitake mushrooms!)
  

Szechuan pepper-corns? You gotta go ethnic. Seaweed? No-brainer: skip Nature's or Wild Oats or Whole whatever. If you're in the NW, Uwajimaya will work just fine, even though that's pretty upscale itself. They do have simply the best fruits and vegatables, bar none, and you pay for 'em.

Oregonian bilge against the blogosphere

Shorter version: Judge Edward Fadeley doesn't like Rick Ross, although it's not clear if Ross said anything manifestly flase and therefore we should have lawsuits against bloggers so that they have "journalistic standards."

Sounds like Fadeley's idea would lead to SLAPP suits to me, frankly.

I wrote them a letter. Let's see if they publish it.

Still stuck in the research mode...

I guess I like what I'm doing because I'm thinking about it night and day.

Too bad I can't discuss it here yet. But it will be published.

And that's cool.

I got an elegant expression yesterday, and I need to massage it a bit to get another elegant expression that will be worth quite a bit in the industry.

Cheap fireworks...

Coke + Mentos....

Nothing much to blog about today...

I'm in the middle of my research, and frankly, don't care about much else today; I've got something that is suddenly quite hot.

Outrageous.

Ed Brayton points to a piece about some clowns in my illustrious state of Washington who don't like a guy writing about internet gambling

What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet casinos. He had links to them, and ran ads by them. He fancied himself a guide to an uncharted frontier, even compiling a list of "rogue casinos" that had bilked gamblers.

All that, says the state — the ads, the linking, even the discussing — violates a new state law barring online wagering or using the Internet to transmit "gambling information."

"It's what the feds would call 'aiding and abetting,' " says the director of the state's gambling commission, Rick Day. "Telling people how to gamble online, where to do it, giving a link to it — that's all obviously enabling something that is illegal."

Just for that...

Uh oh, you better go after me!

I advocate internet gambiling! Because I advocate free speech!

Here's Google's search results on "on line casino!"

And yes, I live in the state of Washington.

You gotta love it...

when you smell litigation in the air in response to Republican lies.

Goooood.

Unintended consequences?

If true, this about wraps it up for pro-lifers:

A philosopher in Britain has ruffled feathers on both sides of the Atlantic by suggesting that the rhythm method of contraception may increase the risk of early embryonic death.

Luc Bovens, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, argues in the Journal of Medical Ethics that couples who try to prevent pregnancy by avoiding sex during the woman's most fertile time of month may be more likely to produce embryos that do not develop or implant in the womb.

If this is correct, he writes, then "millions of rhythm method cycles per year globally depend for their success on massive embryonic death."

Those who worry about early embryonic death should be as concerned about the rhythm method as they are about other forms of contraception, like Plan B, and about embryonic stem cell research, he asserts.

Dr. Bovens's article has drawn swift response from abortion opponents in the United States and the United Kingdom, many of whom are proponents of natural family planning, an outgrowth of what was once called the rhythm method...

Fertility experts say that there is little evidence to support this assumption but that there are some indications it may be valid.

Quote of the day

Evidently channeling Yogi Berra and his earlier incarnation, Lao Tzu, Alan Greenspan is reputed to have said, "If I seem unusually clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."

Living Simply While Traveling.

Good advice here.

Stephen Roach's reading recommendation

Here:

As I looked over my notes on the flight home, one over-arching impression of the mood of the assembled investors jumped off the page -- denial. As always, we start these seminars with a round of introductions, asking each of the assembled investors to pose the most serious issue that was on his or her mind. The state of the global liquidity cycle was at the top of the list. Fully 40% of the assembled cast of investors identified this as one of their biggest concerns. This was hardly shocking. I have found over the years that the mood of these conferences -- whether we hold them in America, Europe, or Asia -- is heavily conditioned by the latest wiggle in the markets. With this meeting coming in a week of tough anti-inflation talk and/ or outright tightening by at least seven central banks, there was an understandable fear of a significant policy-induced withdrawal of excess liquidity from world financial markets. Ironically, this fear did not drive the investment conclusions that were presented at the end of the gathering. Two of the big themes most in favor were commodities and emerging markets -- the same risky assets that have the most to lose in a liquidity-withdrawal scenario. In effect, the powerful risk-reduction trade that has battered these very assets over the past several weeks was treated as a long-overdue, but painfully healthy correction. There was still deep conviction in the potential of powerful "super-cycles" spawned by globalization and concomitant mismatches between aggregate supply and demand.

I found the globalization debate to be the most stimulating aspect of this year’s conference -- in large part, because it shed considerable light on the denial that was to surface in the investment picks at the end of the conference. Of course, I’m letting my own biases come though here, having fixated over the past several years on the interplay between globalization, ever-mounting global imbalances, and world financial markets. We had the benefit of a great provocateur this year, historian Naill Ferguson of Harvard and Oxford, who has just completed his latest opus on contemporary global history, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (Penguin, London, 2006 -- not available in the US until September 2006). Inasmuch as I only received my copy the night before the session, I will confess to only having read about half this 700-page tome. But I will also tell you it is as close to a page-turner in history as you will find -- I have a hard time putting it down. Ferguson treats the 1914 to 1953 era as a critical continuum in modern world history -- punctuated by two related World Wars but also involving brutal cross-border and internal conflicts in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. He dates the end of the world’s bloodiest era of conflict with the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953. But he leaves you with the gnawing sense of concern that this endpoint is still very much an open question.

Ferguson’s gift is not to describe -- although he does plenty of that -- but to analyze. In a provocative introduction to The War of the World, he suggests that this lethal period in contemporary history is an outgrowth of a combination of several powerful forces -- namely, ethnic conflict, extreme volatility in economic conditions, and declining empires. He tied it to our debate by noting two obvious bookends to this devastating conflict -- the globalization of 1880 to 1914 and the new era of globalization we are living through and investing in today. This led to the burning question of the hour: Do the apparent self-destructive tendencies of that earlier era of globalization offer important lessons as to what to expect this time around? For those fully invested in the great secular stories of this globalization -- China, India, commodities, and big-cap multinationals -- this is the question. The overlay with the debate on the global liquidity cycle makes it all the more relevant in the current financial market debate.

Ferguson offered four hypotheses as to why the first globalization met its demise: The failure of central banking; financial crises due to defective market structures; populist backlashes against globalization; and geopolitical crises. He leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that he fears a similar outcome this time around. In his view, central banks are fighting the old war (i.e., inflation) and are in danger of being blindsided by a new war. He fears the current protectionist backlash against globalization -- not just Washington-led China bashing but also a gathering sense of European nationalism -- is strikingly reminiscent of that earlier period. And the Middle East is his prime candidate for a destabilizing geopolitical crisis. He had little to say on the financial risk issue, but he raised his eyebrows a bit when presented with arguments that the advent of derivatives makes the world a safer place by diffusing the distribution of risks. He asked if any of us had heard of an incident not all that long ago (1998) involving Long-Term Capital Management.

Respect and rights....

I am somewhat skeptical of this NY Times article on protests of the Iraq War near funerals of American soldiers:

1. It doesn't point out that Fred Phelps, whose group was protesting at funerals is a conservative.

2. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing anyone I know who's against the war would do.

3. The author's callous disregard for the legitimate first amendment rights of people.

That said, I think there are respectful ways for anti-war protestors to honor the dead, and not be silent. The author of the Times piece, Karen Spears Zacharias, seems to be saying "We want to mourn, but don't remind us of the origin of our mourning." People need to mourn in all kinds of ways, and that needs to be respected. I can imagine that the families of some soldiers would indeed demand that protests be carried out at a funeral; the idea that there's a blanket law against this is a first amendment challenge waiting to happen; after all what is a protest?

Isn't "Bearing Witness," the mindfulness practice of simply being present and aware and silent a protest, respectful though it may be?

In a situation where members of the government lack any accountability and responsiveness to people, how else can one exercise their rights to confront public servants who are - the public's servants?

It turns out that Ms. Spears Zacharias has a blog, and evidently accepts comments. I'd love to hear from her as far as details of specifics where anti-war protesters have actually done and said.

What kind of values do these corporations have?

This bit by the NY Times has the flavor of "those naive kids think they can blog with impunity" but read the following exerpt:

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company's president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois...

"A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?" said the company's president, Brad Karsh. "Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?"

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy...

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors that they were looking at the sites, said Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development.

"The term they've used over and over is red flags," Ms. Steinfeld said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"...

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers, with few restrictions on who can register. Facebook, though, has separate requirements for different categories of users; college students must have a college e-mail address to register. Personal pages on Facebook are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume that they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access to the information in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain their college e-mail addresses, which enables them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

So, let's recap: essentially these employers are encouraging their interns or recent graduates to use what are essentially false pretenses to gain access to information about prospective employees, who are merely exercising in many case their right of free speech.

What kind of judgment would such a management exercise?

Who'd want to work for them?

Ken Wilber loses it...

Over at Blogmandu, there's a good post pointing to the continuing weirdness of Ken Wilber.

Now yeah, I admit that I knew I wouldn't find an actual idea there, and so it's kind of a guilty pleasure to read it. But still...

• What the hell is a "mean green meme?" Can't he say anything without lapsing into jargon that reasonably intelligent folks like me can understand?
  
• Wilber writes, "Derrida is dead, the adolescent rebellion of tearing things down and spray-painting your name on the ruins is over, and the adults are now in the process of, as usual, contributing something constructive and creative for the advancement of humanity in general." He can start by doing something constructive like, you know, figuring out what Derrida actually said, which wasn't just about "tearing things down." See Nagarjuna, too.
  
• "They stole my ideas!" As Blogmandu points out, this comes in response likely to this post here.
  
• Here's a beaut:
  

  But in general, good criticism shows me new areas that I can include. I FUCKING LIVE FOR GREAT CRITICISM, IT MEANS MORE TRUTH FOR A MORE INTEGRAL MODEL.

  
  
  Er, ummm... then why not have comments on your blog?
  
  
• I have neither the time nor patience to go through the rest of this bilge, but I will comment on this bit:
  
  

  In other words, blue will continue to believe that evolution does not exist, no matter how much evidence you produce to the contrary. Blue will actually produce a ton of what it considers to be facts; it will quote the Bible chapter and verse, bringing forth what are indeed actual phenomena and actual facts at that blue level, facts that are absolutely true at that level. So these types of arguments are futile as regards their core claims (although you can always learn something from both sides, simply because they are both producing interesting truths and facts and evidence at their own levels.) But when it comes to cross-level truth-claims, neither side will reach a happy resolution to their core disputes. Orange will not be happy because blue does not accept evolution; blue will not be happy because orange does not accept the Bible. Nor will they be happy until blue evolves to orange (or orange regresses to blue)…. But absent that, both of these less-than-integral levels violate, among other things, the principles of integrative epistemology (see excerpt B).
  
  Thus, it is a completely valid argument for a developmentalist to point out that fact (i.e., the cross-level or paradigm-clash intractability). There is nothing that turquoise or indigo can ever say to green that will make it happy. Thus, the idea that, for example, turquoise is supposed to enter a “dialogue” with green is nonsensical, and nothing in that dialogue will change green’s mind fundamentally (unless green transforms to turquoise). Turquoise can see green and its facts, but green cannot see turquoise and its facts, and thus this cross-level altitude problem jams any real dialogue in that capacity—and yet all that green does is scream for dialogue, dialogue, dialogue…. which in these cases are empty, empty, empty.

  
  
  I have the secret of the universe for you Ken Wilber: when confronted with situations like this, where you are dealing with an opponent, who in the words of Penn and Teller is peddling bullshit, is
  
  
  • a) yes, point out that when an opponent is indeed, in the reality based world, phenomeonlogically, epistemologically, honest-to-goodness full of shit, it is OK to do so (with compassion and wisdom and wit hopefully, and not using potty mouth words like I just did...do as I do not as I say!), but also
    
    
  • b) to change the focus on the discussion to something productive, "where the differences are not a source of conflict" to either quote or paraphrase Thomas Merton.
    
  
  
  The latter really works. In between a) and b) right now I just had an encounter with a Jehovah's Witness, who rang my doorbell. He declined to visit our temple.
  
  

Either Black Ops or the Virgins Came Early...

Or both.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was accompanied by women who wore skimpy clothes and read magazines on current affairs and militant propaganda, an inspection of the house he was killed in showed on Saturday.

The remains of Zarqawi's isolated "safe house" also suggested that the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq and his companions - which an Iraqi army officer said included two women and an eight-year-old girl - lived with few luxuries.

The US military took reporters to the site in the village of Hibhib, near the town of Baquba north of Baghdad, three days after the death of Zarqawi, blamed for beheading hostages and killings hundreds of people in suicide bombings...

There were few clues on Zarqawi's extreme ideology or the militant groups he was linked to in the rubble of the building that was pulverised by two 227kg bombs in a US air strike on Wednesday.

One leaflet identified a radio station in Latifiya south of the capital as an apparent target.

A few feet away was a magazine picture of former US president Franklin D Roosevelt.

Also beside the slabs of concrete was a woman's leopard skin nightgown and other skimpy women's clothes.

FDR? What a radical.

There may have outrageous prices at the pump, but...

when your kid asks, "Daddy, where does gasoline come from?" You can tell him about Edwin Drake, and other interesting facts as well, courtesy of...arrrgghhh.. the Petroleum Institute.

The geology stuff is good...why there's no oil in Japan or the Pacific Northwest...

"Normal?"

I was mildly amused last night by Penn and Teller's bit on the bible, although after infidels.org, it seemed a bit derivative. This morning, again with a dearth of items on which to post, and the work muses going strong, I came across this bit at the Evangelical Outpost:

Not So Crazy -- Recently I stumbled across a post by liberal blogger Ezra Klein that gives me hope for the future of blogospheric political discourse:

We in the blogs experience the Religious Right as a political force, waxing crazy on abortion and gays and modernity. But the believers powering that force don't experience it as a political venture at all. They experience it through community, or sermons on forgiveness, or charity, or neighbors. We look at the Christian Right and see crazy because, when we see them on Crooks and Liars or Kos or The Daily Show, they're acting nuts. But we're not watching the world's most representative snippets. The excesses exist, but were the bulk of these ministries not palatable and relevant to the everyday experiences of lower middle-class Americans, they wouldn't have the political relevancy that's forced us to perk up and notice. Darksyde says his theistic acquaintances seem normal. It's a pretty good bet that, to them, the Christian Right seems normal too.

Read the rest. If only the world had more Ezra Kleins and fewer Ann Coulters.

In this instance Carter - & Klein- are largely right, although I'm not sure if Carter would have put the link from Ezra in if he saw the update:

They offer community, guidance, advice, charity, social capital, entertainment, and even the occasional shot at transcendence. And in return, their member's trust their politics. That's the conveyor at work -- but since we see only the politics, we just end up bewildered by how so many could support such a vicious movement. The movement, mostly, is not vicious, and the politics are a tiny part of the whole. And that's why it's dangerous -- because the politics gain legitimacy through primarily non-political ends, they're thus almost invulnerable to attacks coming from the political sphere. Pat Robertson can say something crazy and then move onto the recipe, and if the recipe is sound, the craziness of a moment before is legitimated, or at least forgotten.

It would be condemned as outragous simply to point out that the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Nation of Islam, and quite a few other groups function the same way.


Notice in the above I said Klein and Carter largely right. I have to point out how these groups go about recruiting: their first priority is to actively seek out impressionable people (children, even children who are not their own - see "Good News Clubs," ), people who are under stress (students at colleges and universities, especially immigrant students, people who are at the business end of the legal system, homeless people), etc.

And the first thing they do do to the stressed out is help them.

But is this normal? Is it normal to do so when there's a quid pro quo of enduring a religious conversion pitch? Is it moral?

I became a Buddhist because the bromides of Christianity led me to abandon them, and because the methods of Buddhism were more immediately useful. (As an example, consider this, and compare and contrast with whatever equivalent you can find in the Christian bible. )

I agree with Ezra Klein that to the right wing Christians, the charity, the love, the forgiveness and community seems very attractive, but that is precisely because charity, love, forgiveness, and community are so rare in the community at large, because we are all divided into us and them. The mirror-image problem for conservative Christians is that they do not grasp that outside of their circles, there can be community, love, forgiveness, and this is aided and abetted by their doctrine.

The key to that is to transcend the bounds of self and other, us and them. But inherently dualistic (or rigidly monistic) doctrines will not be of much benefit in that mission.

Until then, I cannot say that I find such extreme dualism on the conservative Christian side in any way "normal," except as yet another instance of the abundance of delusion that comes to our existence.

Somewhat light posting today...

It's a very busy day, lots of meetings.

Plus, my muse returned my phone call, metaphorically speaking.

When you're inspired to do something really cool that is really fundamental that you can put on your resume & evangelize it, you gotta go with the muse.

Zarqawi doesn't matter

• There's a lot more Arabs than Sioux, and Zarqawi sure as hell was no Crazy Horse.
• Did they think they'd stamp out Christianity by crucifying Jesus?
• No doubt the insurgents took this possibility into account and made contingencies. The former Baathist Iraqi Army can't be all that incompetent.
• And last, but not least, June is a looong way before November.
  

Diagnosis: Economic Malaise

• Northwest Flight Attendants Reject Contract Cutting Pay

• The headline for CA-50 doens't say Busby Wins Calif. House Race.

Prognosis: Markets will continue their downward drift.

I still think this analysis from "Daily Reckoning" nails it:

1. In the past four years, the U.S. economy has received the most prodigious monetary and fiscal stimulus in history. Yet by any measure, its rebound from the 2001 recession is by far the weakest on record in the post-World War II period.

2. Record-low interest rates boosted asset prices and, in their wake, an unprecedented debt-and-spending binge on the part of the consumer.

3. What resulted was a badly structured economic recovery, which - due to grossly lacking growth in capital investment, employment and wage and salary income - never gained the necessary traction to become self-sustainable.

4. Sustained and sufficiently strong economic growth implicitly requires a return to strong business fixed capital spending. We see no chance of this happening. Above all, the outlook for business profits is dismal from the macro perspective.

This takes us to the enormous structural changes that the Fed's new monetary "bubble policy" has imparted to the U.S. economy over the years. While consumption, residential building and government spending soared, unprecedented imbalances developed in the economy - record-low saving; a record-high trade deficit; a vertical surge of household indebtedness; anemic employment and income growth from wages and salaries; outsized government deficits; and protracted, unusual weakness in business fixed investment.

None of these shortfalls is a typical feature of the business cycle. Instead, they are all of unusual structural nature. Yet the bullish U.S. consensus simply ignores them, bragging instead about the U.S. economy's resilience and its ability to outperform most industrialized countries.

To be sure, all these structural deformations tend to impede economic growth. Some, like the trade deficit and slumping investment, do so with immediate effect; others become repressive only gradually and in the longer run. Budget deficits stimulate demand as long as they rise. An existing budget deficit, however large, loses this effect. Rather, it tends to become a drag on the economy. In the past few years, clearly, the massive monetary and fiscal pump-priming policies have more than offset all these growth-impairing influences.

Or, as Stephen Roach says:

The American consumer is now a prime candidate for the weakest link in the global growth chain. The income side of the equation remains decidedly subpar. Despite a falling unemployment rate, labor income generation has suffered from chronic and, more recently, downwardly-revised weakness, as America has lurched from a jobless to an increasingly "wageless" recovery. By our calculations, over the first 53 months of the current cyclical upturn, the cumulative increase in private sector compensation amounted to only about 14% in real terms -- fully $365 billion below the trajectory implied by a more normal expansion. The weak employment report for May points to a further deterioration of this comparison in the 54th month of this recovery.

No bubbles, no wealth effect.

Does this mean he likes to wear furry hats and has a predilection for axes?

From today's NY Times...

The first American to be able to claim descent from Genghis Khan has been discovered. He is Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Dr. Robinson's descent from Genghis Khan emerged in a roundabout way. The Y chromosome of that Mongol emperor was identified in 2003 by geneticists at the University of Oxford in England. Surveying the chromosomes of Asian men, they noticed a distinctive genetic signature in populations from Mongolia to Central Asia. Their common feature was that all but one lay within the borders of the former Mongol empire.

The geneticists concluded that the far-flung Y chromosome must have belonged to Genghis Khan and had become so widespread because of the vigor with which he and his sons labored in their harems, a fact noted by contemporary historians...

Recently, Bryan Sykes, the geneticist who founded Oxford Ancestors, decided to look through his database of some 50,000 people to see if there were any anomalous matches with Genghis Khan's Y chromosome. "We get people wanting to know if they are related to Genghis Khan and they never are unless they come from China or Mongolia," he said yesterday in an interview from England.

Among his non-Asian customers was one hit: Dr. Robinson. "Someone rang him up and I think it came as a nice surprise," Dr. Sykes said.

So, .... this reminds me of a man named Prosser...

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats

.

Not much news today, so here's a bit of Dembski nonsense...

I'll let others worry about Francine Busby... I want to draw your attention to an early bit of Dembski bilge about randomness:

Randomness, properly to be randomness, must leave nothing to chance. It must look like chance, like a child of the primeval chaos. But underneath a keen intelligence must be manipulating and calculating, taking advantage of this and that expedient so as systematically to concoct confusion.

If it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, one would conclude, that phenomenologically, it was a duck.

Probability is silent as to mechanisms.

Let us now repudiate all pretensions to chance and probability, and require
but one thing of randomness: the systematic violation of a fixed set of patterns.

But Dembski, the absence of a pattern itself would be a pattern.

And the question you've never been able to answer is still unanswered: who gets to define a pattern, under what criteria?

Moreover, as spaces become more "dense" (in a loose term,) things that look like "patterns" as arbitrarily defined become too close to "non-patterns" to tell the difference.

Again, if you "know" what was sent in a communication system originally, you can claim it's a "pattern," but only because you know something a priori. And even then, you will make an error a certain percentage of the time.

Odd that this original article ever got published, but of course it was not in a mathematical journal.

Claude Shannon - an appreciation....

I would bet that most of my regular readers have never known of Claude Shannon (or if they do they know of him it is through this blog).

Because of certain aspects of my recent work, I've had the opportunity to peruse some of his writings that seem "obvious" to most engineers doing research in communication theory today, and certainly to most engineers who, like me, studied the analysis and probability because we "knew" that it was needed. But if read properly, with the realization that in 1949 most engineers had never heard of a Hilbert space, one can appreciate the true brilliance of Shannon's work. Even today, come to think of it, I suspect most engineers never heard of Hilbert Spaces or mappings into different dimensions, or understood the connection between the Law of Large Numbers and their Wi-Fi connection.

In invite you to read Shannon's paper Communication in the Presence of Noise. In this paper, Shannon throws out the concept of his famous WT Theorem, the sphere hardening argument for error-free communication, provides an explanation of the threshold effect in FM based on topology - at a level that a good freshman today could understand, and hints at the topological reasoning behind why digital transmission is superior to analog transmission. And he does this all in one paper.

Sure, the math is very sloppy; one gets the feeling that Shannon was afraid of losing his audience if the words "almost everywhere" were almost everywhere. One cannot help but wince at the math in places, but one also understands that the arguments he makes can easily be rigorously formatted. Moreover the clarity of exposition, the forcefulness of his ideas, and the impression that "This guy is actually smarter than this; he's holding pointing towards something even better than what I'm reading here" seem to pervade the work.

When you understand and can extend these ideas, it is like looking into the Orignal Face of the Absolute, the mind of God, Sunyata, whatever you want to call it.

And when you figure out that people will actually pay you money to do this - good money- as long as you can extend the ideas in a way that makes money for the company, you realize you've got a pretty good racket going.

Ah, but I cannot explain William Dembski...

Wen Ho Lee gets a bit of compensation...

I didn't see this widely reported where I usually look...

(AP) Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the U.S. government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources.

Lee, a Taiwanese-American, will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China.

The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed to pay Lee $750,000 as part of the settlement, which ends contempt of court proceedings against five reporters who refused to disclose the sources of their stories about the espionage investigation.

The payment by AP, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and ABC is the only one of its kind in recent memory, and perhaps ever, legal and media experts said.

Freedom of press can never be construed as freedom to libel, and one ongoing feature of this case has been a tendency of the press to go along with whatever right-wing crap came out.

This just follows in the wake of similar suits by Richard Jewell and Gary Condit.

The damages ought to include that news orgs that libel people or report slanders of people as fact should be forced to devote twice as much space, on their front pages or equivalents, to reporting about successful libel suits against them.

Here's a strange correlation...

Thanks to an economic piece about what can go wrong at minyanville.com, I became aware of Google Trends.

Here's a strange correlation: Buddhism and Christianity compared.



Despite the relative dearth of news about Buddhism relative to Christianity, the number of searches about Buddhism is evidently close to that of Christianity, and moreover, correlated with it.

Odd.

The average guy just isn't prospering...

It is amazing that the NY Times should "report" with obfuscation what is plain as the nose on anybody's face:

This strange and unlikely combination — strong and healthy aggregate macroeconomic indicators and a grumpy populace — has been a source of befuddlement to the administration and its allies. It's not unreasonable to assume that Mr. Snow is being replaced as Treasury secretary in part because he couldn't make Americans appreciate just how well the economy is performing. And it's possible to detect among Bush partisans an element of frustration at the public for what they see as its failure to do so. In Iowa last month, Rudolph W. Giuliani bluntly dismissed concerns about the economy and higher gas prices by saying, "I don't know what we're all so upset about."

Gas prices and the Iraq war have surely contributed to this disconnect. But a lesser-known factor is also at work: the misleading aggregates.

Aggregates — big-picture figures like the unemployment rate, productivity and growth in the gross domestic product — are highly useful to economists. But to most people, they're abstractions. You can't use a low unemployment rate to pay a mortgage.

As a result, large aggregates "are something that people may hear about in the news, but don't have a direct impact on how people feel," said Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Survey at the Conference Board.

Aside from being abstract, many of the most popular aggregates are simply misleading. Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington,puts the Consumer Price Index — the main gauge of inflation — at the top of the list.

"It has no direct relationship to what people perceive as inflation," he said. Mr. Baker notes that the index doesn't take account of rapidly rising co-payments and higher insurance deductibles when it calculates health and medical costs. And to gauge inflation in housing, the index approximates a measure of rent instead of looking at home purchase prices.

"We've had a huge run-up in the price of housing, and that doesn't show up in the C.P.I.," he said. So while the index shows that inflation is elevated but still under control — up 3.5 percent from April 2005 to April 2006 — many Americans find themselves paying sharply higher prices for essential goods and services.

In addition, aggregates generally are averages, which are of declining utility in an economy characterized by greater inequality of income and assets. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in March, Mr. Snow took pains to point out that there had been substantial gains in per-capita income (8.2 percent, after inflation) and net worth (24 percent, before inflation) from the beginning of 2001 to the end of 2005.

The data he cited were averages, or means, and that can be misleading. "The average wage is a useful indicator if you want to know what's happening to the tax base, but it might not tell you what's going on for the individual worker," said Alan B. Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. Consider a hypothetical country with 300 million workers. Say the chief executive of an investment bank gets a $300 million raise this year, while the other 299,999,999 workers don't get a raise. In the aggregate, the average per-capita salary has risen by $1, but only one person has more money in his pocket.

To see how typical workers are doing, it's better to look at median wages and incomes — the midpoint that separates the top 50 percent from the lower 50 percent. And median income, which was stagnant during President Bush's first term, is struggling to keep pace with inflation. "Median household income has gone nowhere since the turn of the decade," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Yep. Nowhere.

Here's some fair and balanced reporting on the economy over at Kos.

A tour du net, Saturday, June 3:

• Pat Boone:
  
  

  I'm not referring to the dreaded avian flu, the one we've been reading about that's transmitted from bird to bird, and possibly to some humans or other creatures. No, I'm talking about another affliction. This one is a mental, emotional and verbal malady that seems to incubate most often in the young – particularly those who have already exhibited tendencies toward rebellion, rejection of authority, resentments of various types, grievances, self-righteousness, self-importance, self-indulgence and (of course) impatience.
  
  This fever is transmitted quickly among impressionable and poorly informed young people who generally are looking for quick "fixes" to problems and who have often not learned yet that valuable possessions – like freedom, for example – cost dearly. In a majority of cases, the newly affected ones have been given almost everything that's important to them with little or no expenditure of their own, and therefore they naturally assume that's to be expected all life through. Therefore, they haven't developed any kind of immunity to the Ditsy Chicks Bird Flu. In fact, they often welcome it!
  
  Just in case you're not aware of this contagious ailment, let me describe the three main telltale symptoms. The first is usually an onset of anger and frustration, often disguised as humanitarianism, which is actually present in many cases.
  
  

  
  
  Dude, freedom means you're free to rebel.
  
  Deal with it.
  
  Oh- and all possessions are fleeting.
  
  
  
• Steven Seagal, who is evidently coming to Portland:
  
  

  (Portland Mercury): What can people expect from the Steven Seagal live show?
  
  Steven Seagal: As a Buddhist I don't really like to expect anything. We [of] the Buddhist path kind of consider that a recipe for disaster.

  
  
  
• Noah Levine, punk Dharma guy, coming to some fancy Breitenbush place in Oregon June 2-8. From Willamette Week:
  
  

  Levine says the events are also different because he tries to stay outside the business-driven mentality that has seen the cost of alternative spirituality rise out of reach for many of those who most need it. New Age is a booming industry, with yoga classes averaging $15 at such Portland studios as Yoga in the Pearl and weekend retreat prices shooting up as well—a meditation program at Watsonville, Calif.'s popular destination ashram, Mount Madonna Center, costs $678 with the privilege of private sleeping quarters. "There are people charging exorbitant amounts for these spiritual teachings that should be accessible to everyone," says Levine. "The majority of the teaching I do is by donation, to take it out of that consumer exclusivity." Apparently that conscientious approach to inclusivity can't keep the price down all the time: Aspiring rebel Buddhhists will have to cough up anywhere between $65 and $115, not including the cost of room and board, to get enlightened at Breitenbush.

  
  
  The Portland Buddhist festival's free.
  
  
• The Chrevolet Impala experiences the circle of life and death.
  
  

  The Impala "comes across as the best that the American companies can do," said Brian Moody, a road test editor at Edmunds. com, a Web site that offers buying advice to consumers. "In a vacuum, it's hard to find anything wrong with it. And then you drive the Camry and the Accord."
  
  The strength of those two cars is a reason Asian auto companies took a record 40 percent of the American market in May, when Detroit's market share fell to its second-lowest level in history, less than 53 percent...
  
  With more than two million Camrys on the road, the name "has become almost a household word," said Tom Libby, an industry analyst with J. D. Power & Associates.
  
  Yet, the Impala was an even bigger household name back when Toyota was barely a blip on the radar. Since 1958, the year after Toyota first sold cars here, Chevrolet has sold more than 14 million Impalas, making it one of the most recognizable cars in automotive history.
  
  But unlike Camry, which has been sold continuously in the United States since 1982, always aimed at the family market, G.M. stopped selling the Impala for two stretches in the 1980's and 1990's. From its roots as a fast, chrome-laden car with six taillights, the Impala grew in size, then shrank and, in the eyes of critics, became generic.
  
  Like many other G.M. models, it is sold to rental car companies, government agencies and corporations, markets where Toyota generally does much less business. The Impala is also a police car, bought by, among others, the New York Police Department. About 20 percent of the Impalas go to so-called fleet sales, down from almost half last year (about 10 percent of Camrys are sold to fleets).
  
  Chevrolet is trying to veer away from the bulk sales and sell more to consumers. One goal with the new Impala, said its marketing manager, Mark A. Clawson, is to put features on the car that Toyota does not offer.

  
  
  
• The new asteroid crater found is quite cool:
  
  

  SCIENTISTS believe they have finally solved one of Earth's greatest mysteries: what caused the great extinction of life hundreds of millions of years ago.
  
  The answer was revealed yesterday when an American team announced it had discovered the world's biggest meteor crater almost two kilometres under the ice in Antarctica.
  
  They say a meteor almost 50 kilometres wide caused a 500-kilometre-wide crater deep under the Wilkes Land region of Antarctica, directly south of Australia.
  
  The massive explosion from the impact probably created the continent of Australia, forcing it to break away from the existing land mass.
  
  The incredible discovery caused huge excitement among Australian scientists last night. It could be the missing link in the geological formation of the continents. It would also answer why life on Earth was almost completely wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago.
  
  The meteor the size of Sydney struck 250 million years ago and must have been the biggest explosion ever seen on the planet, far bigger than the 10-kilometre-wide meteor which hit east of Mexico 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.
  
  Ohio State University scientists who found the crater said the massive Antarctic crater could explain the global extinction in the Permian-Triassic period when all animal life on Earth died out, clearing the way for the dinosaurs.
  
  The massive impact probably broke up the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, pushing Australia out on its long drift north to its current position. The landmass that became India shot off first, while Africa and South America broke off later.
  
  "This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," said Ralph von Frese, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University.

  
  
  What will creationists say to that?
  
  
• And last, but not least, Robert Fisk has some unsettling points about Iraq:
  
  

  I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."
  
  What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Falun Gong post...

A few years ago I was treated to a pitch by members of Falun Gong, and was accompanied by a (neutral) Chinese professor of Chinese studies at a local university, as well as my wife, who helped translate some of the more bizarre claims of the pitch. Li Hongzi represented himself as a successor to the Buddha and Boddhisattvas, claimed in effect only he could profit from the teaching of Falun Gong, claimed that his method was "the best" of the 84,000 doors of Buddhism, and in general did the "I'm the leader of the cult" thing in a Chinese paradigm. This I all had translated to me, by folks who didn't have an axe to grind, one way or the other.

I had later done a bit of background work on my own, and the claims that "Falun Gong is a superior form of Buddhism" is kind of like saying "Buddhism is a superior form of Islam." From one source:

Falun (Law Wheel) and Falun Gong

Q: What does the Falun consist of?

A: The Falun is an intelligent being consisting of high-energy substances. It transforms Gong (cultivation energy) automatically and it does not exist in our dimension.

Q: What does the Falun look like?

A: It can only be said that the color of a Falun is golden yellow. This color does not exist in our dimension. The background color of the inner circle is a very bright red. The background of the outer circle is orange. There are two red-and-black Taichi (Yin-Yang) symbols, which belong to the Tao School. There are also two other red-and-blue Taichi symbols, which belong to the Great Pre-Taoism School. These are two different schools. The swastika symbol "" is golden yellow. People with Tianmu (third eye) of a lower level see the Falun rotate similar to an electric fan. If one can see it clearly, it is very beautiful and can inspire the practitioner to cultivate even harder and strive forward vigorously.

Q: Where is Falun located initially? Where is it located later?

A: I really only gave you one Falun. It is located at the lower abdomen, the same location where the Dan (energy cluster) we talked about is cultivated and kept. Its position does not change. Some people can see many Falun spinning. Those are used externally by my Fashen (law body) to adjust your body.

Q: Can Falun be developed through practice and cultivation? How many of them can be developed? Is there any difference between these and the one given by master?

A: Falun can be developed through practice and cultivation. As your energy potency continues to strengthen, more and more Falun will be developed. All Falun are the same. The only thing is that the Falun located at the lower abdomen area does not move around, because it is the root.

Q: How can one feel and observe the presence and rotation of the Falun?

A: There is no need to feel or observe it. Some people are very sensitive, and will feel the rotation of Falun. During the initial period after Falun is installed, you may feel a little unused to it being in your body, you may have abdominal pain, or feel like something is moving and have the sense of warmth, etc. After you have adapted to it, you will not have any sensation. But, people with supernormal capabilities can see it. It is just the same with the stomach; you do not feel the movement of your stomach.

Q: The direction in which the Falun rotates on the Falun emblem is not the same as the one on the student pass (referring to the first and second seminars). The Falun printed on the student pass for the seminar rotates counterclockwise. Why?

A: The goal is to give you something good. Its outward emission of energy adjusts everyone’s body, so it does not rotate clockwise. You can see it rotating.

Q: At what time does master install the Falun in the students?

A: We want to discuss this with all of you here. We have some students who have practiced many different practices. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have to get rid of all the messy and disorderly things that exist in the body, keeping the good and throwing away the bad. Therefore, this is an additional step. After that, Falun may be installed. According to the level of his cultivation, the size of Falun installed varies. Some have never practiced Qigong before. Through readjustment and with good inborn quality, some people may have their sicknesses eliminated in my class, leaving the level of Qi and entering into the state of "Milky White Body". Under those circumstances, Falun can also be installed. Many people have poor health. They are undergoing adjustments continuously. How can Falun be installed before the adjustments are completed? This is only a minority. Do not worry. I have already installed the Qiji (energy mechanism) that can form the Falun.

Q: How is the Falun carried?

A: It is not carried. I send out the Falun and install it in your lower abdomen. It is not in our physical dimension, but in a different one. If it were in this dimension, with the intestines that are inside of your lower abdomen, what would happen if it started to spin? It exists in another dimension and is in no conflict with this one.

Q: Will you continue to give out Falun in your next class?

A: You will get only one. Some people sense the rotation of many Falun. These are for external use, only for the purpose of adjusting your body. The biggest feature of our exercise is when energy is emitted, a string of Falun are being released. Therefore before you start to practice, you already have many Falun spinning in your body, adjusting your body. The Falun that I truly give to you is the one located in the lower abdomen.

(Read the whole bit here. I'm sure Theravadins will be surprised to know they have "supernormal abilities.")

What this has to do with The Four Noble Truths, or The Eightfold Path, or relying on one's self, or anything that Buddhists would recognize is beyond me.


So it was with a bit of surprise that I came across a bit of pro-Falun Gong propaganda over at getreligion.org, which uncritically takes The Epoch Times as a reliable source. (Incidentally, it's likely The Epoch Times connection that leads most Chinese I know to suspect that the incident over the Bush/Hu Jintao press conference was staged; the Bush folks they say simply can't be so incompetent as to not know who they were letting in to that press conference. I'm not so sure -they're not very competent.)

While I'm against thuggery of course, and I don't think the governments should rely on brutality to deal with spiritual fraudsters, I also think that there ought to be a basic fidelity to what people actually express when they express themselves, and Falun Gong has as much in common with Mahayana Buddhism as say, Bahai'ism does with Judaism.

Fair and Balanced Treatment of War Crimes

By now the progressive blogosphere is (rightly) aghast at the bald-faced smear of American troops who died for their country by Bill O'Reilly who appears to be a Nazi sympathizer with his recent remarks.

But a brief check of the web will tell you about Dachau, and what Americans did there to German soldiers captured.

Unfortunately for O'Reilly that's still a horrible comparison: gunning down helpless, innocent families and others simply cannot compare to a vengence killing of perpetrators of genocide and mass killing.

There will be from time to time, though, incidents in war when soldiers crack, and when things like this happen. Though it doesn't excuse such war crimes, we have to understand that an inevitable consequence of war is the misuse of war powers, but that is precisely why such misuses must be investigated and prosecuted when found, the Bill O'Reillys of the world notwithstanding.

The Great Matter of Life and Death...

I used this phrase recently to describe our family interaction...here is one reason why it's apt:

You as you are: buddha- nature. This does not mean that you have directly realized it, nor that you are living from an experience of All. It does mean that you have all the potential that is needed to directly awaken to this nature and to actualize it in your very life. Yasutani Roshi says buddha-nature is of three kinds: fundamental- cause buddha-nature (shoin bussho), or the fact of already being buddha-nature; capacity-to-realize buddhanature (ryoin bussho), or you must realize it for it to be of any worth; and cooperating-cause buddha-nature (enin bussho). The cooperating-cause already exists inside of us, whether it be a teacher, the sound of bamboo, the sangha—all together, everything is already cooperating for us to realize this fundamental nature.

Buddha-nature. So what is the essence of all life? It is indeed tricky to speak of the basic characteristics of buddha- nature because when we do, we immediately make it into a thing. Nevertheless, it is important to speak of it. The fundamental characteristic of buddha-nature is sunyata (Sanskrit), often translated as emptiness, or, more accurately, empty of all independent existence. All is empty of any fixed condition. Yasutani Roshi says, “Everything is in a temporary state as defined by particular causes and conditions.” (This leads us directly to the aspects of cause and effect and the formation of the ego-centered self, which we will explore later.)

We often speak of this characteristic as impermanence or change. Everything is in a condition of not lasting, of having no fixed identity, although appearing right now as a brunette, an oak table, a blue jay, you and me, or whatever. All is without a fixed-reference point. All is without a fixed “I” which is in constant birth and death according to conditions. Practice is to see through this fixed sense of self. We say: Empty out the subject; empty out the object; empty out the emptying out. This is the Great Matter of Life and Death which we penetrate.

You can see this transcendance of subject and object moment to moment if you have a child, and it is indeed humbling. It's why I have to respectfully disagree with some folks who think "entering the stream" is for avowed monks only.

Scary article on the aftermath of Enron

in Salon.

Alas, the root causes of Enron are still with us, and getting worse. I am pained to report that in the breeding grounds of corporate crime, the teeming Gold Coast mansions and sweaty polo clubs, little has changed in the executive attitudes that brought us Enron. If Ken and Jeff are the incorrigible Billy Halop bullies in this melodrama, we -- society as a whole, my friends -- must share the blame. Did we not hear their yelps of greed? Their defensive blame shifting? The keening of their flacks?

How easily we forget the root causes: the pampering, the permissiveness. How easily we forget the SEC's granting Enron, in 1997, the exemption from the Investment Company Act that it needed in order to structure its operations to shift debt off the books. The media functioned as an unofficial pep squad, and the earliest warnings were sounded not by reporters but by "short-sellers," market players who bet that stock prices will decline.

Shorts are always on the lookout for a good stock fraud, which makes them almost universally despised, particularly by corporations with something to hide. Short-sellers were the earliest naysayers concerning Enron, with short-seller James Chanos acknowledged to be a source for Bethany McLean's early groundbreaking article in Fortune. Chanos saw to it that the bad news about Enron traveled fast -- and, in the process, he made a few bucks. As both the bearers and profiteers of bad news, short-sellers are hardly winning popularity contests. They were already ancient, reliable scapegoats by the crash of 1929, and remain so today.

But the traditional hatred of shorts was forgotten after the Enron scandal broke in late 2001. During that brief window of time, Congress and the SEC were stirred to action, and even the somnolent financial press became enlivened. The details of Enron (basically a lot of crooked accounting with some insider trading thrown in) were murky, and that proved propitious when it came time for the putative guardians of our financial markets to come up with "solutions."...

What Sarbox has never done, and never could do, is change corporate behavior, anymore than you can stop a car thief by taping a Do Not Steal sign to the dashboard. Remember that CEOs who are going to pull off a mega-scam like Enron, or even a routine stock swindle or accounting trick, are not going to be deterred by a law book or someone with a stinkin' badge. They have a more pragmatic view of corporate responsibility -- they feel they don't have any. If you listened closely, you heard the Enron management credo at the trial. It is the same philosophy that has been employed by second-story men and Mafia bosses since the dawn of the first proto-scam. It can be summed up as, "If it's broke, it ain't broke, and anyway it ain't my fault."

Under this credo, if a company has some kind of difficulty, whether it be a massive fib on its balance sheet or a simple tendency to lose money, the problem is not the company, and heaven forbid not the CEO or the board of directors. It is them. The objects of blame can be short-sellers, "Wall Street," journalists, independent analysts (another post-Enron Good Thing we are supposed to cherish) or sometimes all of the above working in cahoots. Lay and Skilling personally acknowledged the popularity of this latest corporate rage at their trial, when they testified that Enron was a victim of evil short-sellers working in league with journalists, unfairly driving down the share price.

The them defense is gaining currency, bringing the paranoia of UFO-ers and four-shooters-at-Dealey-Plaza wackadoos into the boardrooms and business news programs of America. The media, instead of scoffing at such rubbish -- there are notable exceptions -- either ignores them or actively promotes their cause.

First of all, these crooks create an opportunity for short-sellers, whose work (with a disclosure or two therein) is entirely legit. I have invested in the Grizzly Fund, a short fund, for example.

It went down yesterday, but overall, it's been up.

A company for which I used to work used this "short sellers" excuse. In retrospect, I should go the SEC and complain, but it's been well over 7 years since I worked there, and likely the statute of limitations has expired on any corporate hanky-panky. Moreover, their CEO has since left, good riddance to him.

Read the rest of the article, if you have any idea that the mainstream media will tell you the full story on the rackets involved in "investing."